Sugar has more names than you may know
You don’t always see the word “sugar” on a food label. It sometimes goes by other names. These are some of the most popular sugars and sweeteners you will see on labels, and I highly recommend you avoid them.
- White table sugar
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Brown rice syrup
- Dextrose
- Glucose
- Lactose
- Sucrose
- Evaporated cane juice
- Malt syrup
- Agave nectar, (I used this in place of sugar for years)
When you look at the label of a product, look at the ingredient list. One of the most common tricks manufacturers use is to distribute sugars among many ingredients so that sugars don’t appear in the top three. For example, a manufacturer may use a combination of sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown sugar, dextrose, and other sugar ingredients to make sure none of them are present in large enough quantities to attain a top position on the ingredients list (Ingredients are always listed in order of their proportion in the food, with the most dominant ingredients listed first).
This fools consumers into thinking the product isn’t made mostly of sugar while, in reality, the majority ingredients could all be different forms of sugar. It’s a way to artificially shift sugar farther down the ingredients list and thereby misinform consumers about the sugar content of the whole product.
Be on the Lookout for Hidden Sugar
Sugar can hide in foods where you least expect it, take a quick look in your fridge. If you have ketchup, barbecue sauce, and pasta sauce, they will more likely than not contain a lot of sugar. Another place you will find sugar is in those reduced-fat salad dressings, and mayonnaise.
I grabbed a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s out of our fridge and snapped a photo of the label, including the ingredients.
It’s sweet alright, check out the first ingredient, high fructose corn syrup. But it doesn’t stop there. It also has pineapple juice concentrate, molasses, and sugar, let’s not forget the caramel color, also made from sugar.
Nutritional Information
Now let’s look to the nutritional information; one serving of Sweet Baby Ray’s has 16 grams of sugar. In simple math, that is four teaspoons of granulated sugar. Would you ever sit down and eat four teaspoons of straight sugar? Of course not.
This is just one example of hidden sugars, so it’s no wonder that the average American eats 160 pounds of sugar a year.
Takeaway
I want to challenge you to get in the habit of reading labels. Don’t worry so much about the nutrition facts (although necessary, and we will cover later), go straight to the ingredient list. Filter out high-sugar foods before they hit your shopping cart.