Here are some lower-calorie substitutes for popular snacks:
- Cereal bars: despite their healthy image, many cereal bars can be high in sugar and fat. Look out for bars that are lower in sugar, fat, and salt.
- chocolate; swap for a lower-calorie hot instant chocolate drink. You can also get chocolate with coffee and chocolate with malt varieties.
- Biscuits—swap for oatcakes, oat biscuits, or unsalted rice cakes, which also provide fiber.
- Cakes—swap for a plain currant bun, fruit scone, or malt loaf. If you add toppings or spreads, use them sparingly or choose lower-fat and lower-sugar varieties.
Dried fruit, such as raisins, dates, and apricots, is high in sugar and can be bad for your dental health because it sticks to your teeth.
To prevent tooth decay, dried fruit is best enjoyed at mealtimes—as part of a dessert, for example—rather than as a snack.
Nearly a quarter of the added sugar in our diets comes from sugary drinks such as fizzy drinks, sweetened juices, milkshakes, and cordials.
A can of regular cola contains 7 teaspoons of sugar (35g). Try switching to water, sugar-free or no-added-sugar drinks, or lower-fat milks.
If you take sugar in tea or coffee, gradually reduce the amount until you can cut it out altogether, or try swapping to sweeteners instead. Try some new flavors with herbal teas, or make your own with hot water and a slice of lemon or ginger.
Like some fizzy drinks, fruit juice can be high in sugar. When juice is extracted from the whole fruit to make fruit juice, sugar is released, and this can damage your teeth.
Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice, and smoothies should not be more than 150 ml a day, which is a small glass. For example, if you have 150 ml of orange juice and 150 ml of smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150 ml.
Fruit juices and smoothies do contain vitamins and minerals and can count towards your 5-a-day. However, they can only ever count as a maximum of 1 portion of your 5-A-Day. For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
You could try flavoring water with a slice of lemon, lime, or a splash of fruit juice. But watch out for the sugar content in squash or cordials with added sugar. Some can contain up to 3 teaspoons of sugar in each glass.
Dessert
Work out some ground rules. Do you need to have dessert every day? How about only having dessert after your evening meal, only eating dessert on odd days of the month, only on weekends, or only at restaurants?
Do you have to have chocolate, biscuits, and cake every day? If you had this type of sugary snack less often, would you actually enjoy it more?
Less sugary desserts include fruit—fresh, frozen, dried, or tinned—but choose those canned in juice rather than syrup, as well as lower-fat and lower-sugar rice pudding and plain lower-fat yogurt.
However, lower fat does not necessarily mean lower sugar. Some lower-fat yogurts can be sweetened with refined sugar, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, or fructose syrup.
If you're stuck between choosing two desserts at the supermarket, why not compare the labels on both packages and go for the one with the lower amount of sugar?
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