When you first embark upon eating a primal or paleo diet, you might just be getting used to checking labels on your favorite foods. Back when Scott started down the paleo path, he mentioned how he was getting into the habit of reading the ingredient list first. He then asked about added sugars and if there is any harm to a little here and there.

This is a great question as we often recommend easily transportable items like beef jerky for a quick snack and source of protein. The problem lies in that the vast majority of jerky has sugar added as well as soy sauce (gluten). So will it kill you? No — but you don’t want to make it a habit to have several foods with added sugar. Those couple grams of sugar here and there add up and eventually you’re cheating a bit on each meal. That begins a slippery slope where you may find your tastes reverting to the Standard American Diet (SAD). While you may make an exception for jerky, if you then also figure a couple grams of sugar in your BBQ sauce or steak seasoning, etc., you can quite quickly end up with a lot of sugar.

Melissa Urban over at Whole9Life.com recently posted about this exact subject. I encourage you to read the whole article, here’s an excerpt:

So here’s a caution – read your labels. Doesn’t matter if it’s the first ingredient or the last, or if the sugar is in the form of cane or agave or syrup or honey. If it’s got sugar, or soy, or corn, or ingredients you can’t identify or pronounce – it’s OUT. But don’t just label-read and toss foods aside – learn from this experience. Take a moment to be outraged at how food manufacturers and advertisers trick consumers into a false state of health by using buzzwords on labels. Learn to translate complicated ingredients (xylitol and sorbitol = sugar). And weed out those foods that don’t fit into your new way of eating and find healthier alternatives in your local markets.

WOD 05.07.12

AMRAP 3:

3 Power Cleans (135# / 95#)
6 Push-ups
9 Squats

Rest 1 minute. Repeat for 5 Cycles.

Complete as many rounds as possible in each cycle. Goal is to maintain that max number of rounds across the 5 cycles.