dissolve the sugar into water then filter the rice out and boil the water off

If you move your mouth from side-to-side, when you are chewing fun, it promotes the chance of you biting your mouth.

Though if you don't, then it helps train you to keep your mouth chewing in one place. So it does help you not bite your mouth if you don't chew randomly or up-and-down.

Given the vast variety of food types, it's not possible to say. Fruits contain the majority of their calories as sugars- yet no one would suggest you restrict your fruit consumption because of this! Instead of focusing on percentage of sugar, consider instead the positive nutritional aspects of the food, such as fiber content, fruit, vegetable, whole grain and lean protein content. By avoiding products with added sugars, you'll be consuming a product that's more nutritionally dense- 100 calories of unsugared strawberries provides more fruit than 100 calories of sugared strawberries. For carbohydrate grain based products, such as cereals, granola, breads, granola bars and such, it can be very difficult to estimate the proportion of calories coming from added sugars. An easy way to make a reasonable estimate of a cereal or grains' "wholeness" (you are eating whole grains, I hope!) is to divide the total grams of carbohydrates in a serving by the number of grams of fiber in a serving. The lower the better. For instance, if a product contains 40 grams of carbs and 5 grams of fiber- the carb/fiber ratio is 40/5=8- pretty good. On the other hand, some foods may have 23 carbs and 1 gram of fiber- 23/1= 23- not very good at all. High ratios tend to be indicative of added, enriched flours, extra sugars, or no whole grains. A "good" cereal product will have a ratio of less than 10. Unsugared whole wheat has a ratio of about 4.

One would think so- after all, if you do everything else the same, you'd imagine that you'd be consuming a couple hundred calories a day fewer, which should lead to weight loss. Unfortunately, studies in which regular-soda drinkers were randomly switched to diet showed no difference in weight loss. It appears that the diet soda drinkers compensated for the lack of calories by consuming more of other foods. Some researchers speculate that the sweetness of the soda might encourage people to consume more. So if all other things are held equal, switching to diet should help a person lose weight. But in the real world, you don't hold everything else constant, and switching to diet doesn't seem to encourage weight loss. Probably a better choice altogether is to simply give up soda and instead drink water or unsugared tea.