How much does a gram weigh?

In the United States, we're very used to thinking of weight in terms of pounds and ounces. Few of us know or understand or think of weight in terms of grams or kilograms. Yet almost all of the nutritional information on the side of packaged foods is measured in grams. So how much is a gram?

1 kilogram = 1000 grams
2.2 Pounds = 1 kilogram

OK, but that might not help us much. Let's look at an example:

We have all grown up knowing that drinking fruit juice is good for us because it contains vitamin C. That may be true, but many fruit juices also contain a lot of sugar and therefore may be bad for folks with Type II diabetes.

A 10 ounce bottle (1 serving) of a popular grape juice drink contains 54 grams of sugar. We think of grams as very tiny units of measurement, so we don't care much about this. But let's say you drink one 10 ounce bottle of this juice per day for a month. That means over the course of 30 days you are consuming 54 grams per day times 30 days = 1620 grams of sugar. That is 1.62 kilograms, or about 3.5 pounds of sugar! And that's just from your "healthy" fruit drink; yikes!

If we instead switch to orange juice with 28 grams of sugar per serving and we only drink 1/3 of a bottle per day, we've reduced our sugar intake from 3.5 pounds per month to only about 2/3 of a pound over the course of a month, an 80% reduction. Much better.

A similar analogy can be made for soda. A 12-ounce can of regular soda can contain up to 50 grams of sugar, but most diet sodas contain less than a gram per 12-ounce can.

(If you think this reduces your vitamin C intake too much, you could consider adding a vitamin C supplement pill or chewable.)