> Is it healthy to have dessert every day provided we’re staying under 25-30g?
What’s your definition of healthy? My prof. always said that there are no healthy or unhealthy foods, just healthy/unhealthy diets. But to put it simply, desserts are not generally considered a “healthy food” because they tend to be “empty calories”. This means they have quite a few calories (increasing risk for obesity), while not providing many essential or beneficial nutrients (good fats, protein, fiber, micros, secondary plant compounds,..).
Now, are desserts unhealthy? Again, how do we define unhealthy? Sure, there are some ingredients that might actually directly have a negative impact on your health (when consumed regularly and in sufficient amounts), but for the most part, the main problem is that you could have eaten something nutritionally dense (mostly plant stuff) or nothing at all (saving calories and thus fighting obesity) instead.
So no, in “normal amounts” sugar or desserts are not per se unhealthy. They just take away quite a few calories that you could have used in another way.
If you eat a balanced diet and get everything you need elsewhere, there is nothing stopping you from getting a dessert. The problem starts, when people mainly eat fast food, little to no plant-based foods, and then add desserts, since they won´t fill the nutritional void but at the same time increase the risk of obesity, which then clearly can be labeled as unhealthy.
Basically: If your goal isn´t losing weight (and even then) and you eat “healthily” have a dessert and don´t think about it any further.
Just to give my perspective, for me every once in a while=a couple times per week. I workout a lot and eat mainly vegetables, whole grains, and legumes.
But I love baking!! I bake a dessert at least every weekend and I enjoy the process as well as eating it :)
My goals are to make sure I’m meeting my nutritional needs and am living a balanced life and I think I’m achieving that! Would it objectively be better not to indulge in the desserts? Maybe if my goals were to lose weight or eat as much nutritionally dense food as humanly possible, but they’re not!
If your goals are to get lots of veggies and meet your nutritional needs and you’re able to do that with a daily dessert there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I do think it may be hard to maintain because it’s a lot of calories so you’d have to be really picky with how you eat the rest of the day.
For me completely cutting out things for my diet caused me to develop binge eating and I eventually started purging. Telling myself that I’m never allowed to have dessert again for the rest of my life, made me feel deprived. On top of that I wasn’t eating enough calories day-to-day and it was just a recipe for binge eating. In my opinion the healthiest option would be to have dessert once in a while, if you want. Even if it puts you over your sugar limit, doing that once or twice a month is not going to destroy your health or make you gain weight.
Nobody really needs dessert, not everybody likes sweets, if you don’t really have any craving for dessert don’t force it, but if you find yourself wanting dessert once in a while go for it.
To be honest, when I started looking at sugar content in the non-dessert food I consumed, I was shocked. It is everywhere. Outside of the homemade pudding frozen fudge pops (sugar free Jello mix/sugar free oat milk or skim milk mixed) that I eat for dessert, I haven’t eaten a single sugary treat in 2-years.
Kind of hard when there is always candy, doughnuts, etc in the breakroom at work, but it is a good exercise in self control, haha.
On the surface, yes to an extent you have a point! If you watched your intake etc and all thing being equal (calorie in calorie out)YES you could have a dessert everyday and it be fine. However it’s not as simple as that, to start with, the recommendation of no more than 30g of sugar comes from the fact that they feel it the lowest it could be and still possibly achieve-able in most of the population if they could the recommendation would be 0g. It’s not long ago we were consuming a lot less than 30g a day and for thousands of years we ate practically none. The problem here is excess chronic high blood sugar is bad for the body (fact) as well as blood sugar spikes. So ideally you would want to keep your blood sugar stable and as low you can comfortably go for optimal health. Which means cutting out all excess sugar from the diet so NO it’s not ok to eat desserts. And more than that if you were going to eat excess sugar in the form of a modern dessert it’s not just the sugar you need to worry about, the bread, toxic seed oils and chemical foods colouring are just some of the problems above and beyond the sugar! So if you look closely there’s no free lunch or dessert in this case!