A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but the health effects of too much sweet stuff are far from delightful, according to a recent scientific report from the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

The committee, a group of scholars and other experts, is helping the federal government revise its nutritional standards. Updated every five years, the standards inform federal food and nutrition policy, including school lunches, food-assistance and educational programs. They cover recommendations on cholesterol, salt, solid fats, and sugars, as well as alcohol, caffeine and healthy nutrients.

Our eating habits as a country are making us sick, the report concluded. “The economic and social costs of obesity and other diet- and physical activity-related chronic disease conditions are enormous and will continue to escalate if current trends are not reversed,” members wrote.

While the final 2015 dietary guidelines won’t be complete until late this year, the scientific report shows the likely direction they’ll take, experts say. These guidelines take a harder line on added sugars than previous ones.

The consumption of added sugars — also called “empty calories” since they confer few or no nutrients — has been linked to chronic illnesses from diabetes to heart disease. To stay our healthiest, we’ve got to cut back, the report concluded. “We need to de-sweeten the American palate,” said Mary Story, professor of global health and community & family medicine at Duke Global Health Institute and the co-lead of the advisory committee’s added sugars working group, in an interview.

The 2010 nutritional guidelines recommended reducing our intake of calories from added sugars, without quantifying any target amounts. This year, after a review of the latest scientific evidence, committee members recommended an upper limit of 10% of daily total calories from added sugars. Currently, the average American consumes 268 calories, or 13.4% of the daily total, from added sugars. Those who eat less are a small minority: across most ages in the U.S., around 90% of both sexes reach or exceed the recommended intake of empty calories.

As we get older and our caloric requirements decline, our allowance of added sugars shrinks proportionately. A moderately active woman of between 51 and 55 needs 1,800 calories per day, compared with 2,000 calories for her counterpart between ages 46 and 50, according to government guidelines. Moderately active men between ages 46 and 65 need 2,400 calories, whereas those 66 and above need 2,200. (These recommendations were based on people of normal height and weight; moderate activity was defined as the physical activity equivalent to walking about 1.5 to 3 miles per day at 3 to 4 miles per hour, plus the light physical activity associated with daily life.)

A sugar by any other name

As their name suggests, added sugars are added during the processing of foods, or are packaged in sweetener packets. Fruit juice concentrates are also added sugars, since they’re isolated from a whole food and concentrated so that sugar is the primary component. By contrast, intrinsic sugars are present naturally within the food and are not a cause for concern.

Added sugars are “natural,” and they can even be organic, but that doesn’t make them good for us. Agave nectar, brown rice syrup, and other sweeteners sometimes touted by food manufacturers as healthier alternatives to white sugar still have the same effect on blood glucose levels, said Kristin Kirkpatrick, manager of wellness nutrition services at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. “You can sexy up the names of tons of different sugars, but at the end of the day it’s still sugar,” Kirkpatrick said. Honey falls into the same category and must be consumed in moderation.

The dietary advisory committee also looked at low-calorie artificial sweeteners such as aspartame to see if they proved any healthier than sugars. Not finding compelling evidence of artificial sweeteners’ long-term safety, experts didn’t endorse widely substituting them for added sugars.

Diabetics have a bit more leeway to consume artificial sweeteners, since unlike sugars these sweeteners have a limited effect on blood sugar and insulin. That said, it’s best even for diabetics to curb their sweet cravings rather than to indulge them through artificial sweeteners, Kirkpatrick said. Consuming artificial sweeteners increases the likelihood that we’ll eventually consume sugars, she said. “Falling off the sugar wagon is really easy to do,” she said.

Increased sugar consumption contributes to obesity, which in turn contributes to the development of Type II diabetes. But that doesn’t mean that thin people get a free pass to indulge: The committee reviewed scientific evidence that increased added-sugar consumption was its own risk factor for diabetes, independent of weight, said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the added sugars working group.

Adding it all up

It’s not that easy for people to calculate their added-sugar consumption, a fact committee members acknowledged even as they proposed a ceiling on empty calories. Nutritional labels lump added and intrinsic sugars together under the general category of sugars, measuring them in grams.

In many cases, the sugars in a given food are all added. But some foods, such as yogurt, have a mixture of added and intrinsic sugars. The Food and Drug Administration is proposing to update the nutritional facts label with added sugars as a separate category, which would make consumers’ task much easier.

For now, folks can use the general sugars category to do a ballpark calculation. There are four calories in every gram of sugar, so multiply the grams of sugars on the nutritional label by four to get the calories to count toward the daily total.

Those who want to drill down further can compare the non-sweetened and sweetened versions of the same food. For example, comparing the grams of sugars in plain yogurt with a sweetened flavor of the same brand yields a good idea of the added sugars in the latter.

A 2,000 calorie-diet should contain no more than 200 calories, or 50 grams, of added sugars. At 12 to 13 teaspoons, “that’s still a lot,” Hu said. The committee found that the ideal consumption of added sugars was closer to 5% of total calories but felt that limiting sugars to 10% was a more realistic goal for now, given our starting point of upward of 13%, Hu said.

Cutting back

One way to reduce added sugars in our diet is to cut back on one of the biggest culprits: sweetened beverages. Beverages supply 47% of the U.S. population’s added sugars intake, according to the committee’s report. Much of this is soda, experts say, although sports energy drinks are also a common source of added sugars.

While serious distance athletes can benefit from these sports drinks—as well as those who are dehydrated from illness—the average gym rat should stick to water, said Miriam Nelson, associate dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, and co-chair of the added sugars group.

Generally, consumers have a lighter hand than manufacturers when it comes to adding sugars to their food and drink, Kirkpatrick said. In other words, if left to our own devices we’ll add fewer teaspoons of sugar to our coffee than the café, and less sugar to the food we cook ourselves than the restaurant. Bottom line: to the extent possible, it’s best to eat in.

If this all sounds tedious, that’s because it is—at least at first. But cutting back on added sugars comes with a clear health payoff. We’ll reduce our risk of chronic diseases, feel more energetic, and maybe shed some pounds in the process.

It really is possible to retrain our palates, Kirkpatrick said: the less we eat sweet stuff, the less we’ll crave it. So the effort becomes easier over time. Said Kirkpatrick, “you have to give yourself the chance to succeed before you allow yourself to fail.”