13 breakfast items with more sugar than a doughnut

If you think a doughnut is one of the most sugar-laden breakfast choices you could make, you’d be wrong.

This isn’t to say a doughnut is ever a nutritious choice. While delicious, it’s filled with empty calories and provides you with virtually none of the vitamins and nutrients that will keep you alive, whereas something like a banana is a good source of potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin C and vitamin B-6.

But, shockingly, a banana has more sugar than a doughnut.

Now, don’t stop eating bananas just yet. But it’s important to be aware of how much sugar you’re eating. The World Health Organization recommends that only 5 percent of daily caloric intake come from sugar, and the typical American diet consists of 13 percent calories from sugar.

“Many Americans eat about five times the amount of sugar they should consume,” Natasa Janicic-Kahric, an associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University Hospital, told The Washington Post.

Besides contributing to weight gain, sugar ― whether natural or added ― has a host of negative effects on our bodies: It creates a vicious cycle of intense cravings, impairs memory and learning skills, may cause or contribute to depression and anxiety, and is a risk factor for age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

So let’s take a look at how much sugar is in13 common breakfast items that, while often more nutritious than a doughnut, contain more sugar than a glazed treat from Dunkin’ Donuts, which contains 260 calories and 12 grams of sugar.

(To be fair, not all doughnuts are created equal: An apple fritter from Dunkin’, for instance, has 420 calories and 24 grams of sugar.)

Here’s the rundown.

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