The University of California at San Francisco has a division called Sugar Science. The college uses this branch to deliver what they call “The Unsweetened Truth” about refined sugar, and that truth is far from positive.
You probably aren’t surprised. A lot of people know that eating too much sugar can lead to a number of health problems. It is directly related to becoming overweight and obese, two conditions that in turn cause several other serious health conditions. Eat too much sugar, and you raise your risk of developing heart disease, a number of cancers, mental health disorders, and other medical situations you’d rather avoid.
Statistics show that the average American consumes about 20 teaspoons of sugar every day. Immediately upon reading that figure, you might think that you are well below average. You say, “I don’t add anywhere near that many teaspoons of sugar to my food and drinks. I am definitely an exception to that statistic.”
Guess what? You’re probably scarfing down that much sugar (and maybe even more) without even knowing it. That’s because food manufacturers intentionally hide the presence of sugar by giving it other names.
By the way, this is entirely legal. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States allows it. Refined sugar can be produced in a number of ways, and therefore it can “technically” be called by different names. The problem here is obvious. You and I and the typical consumer don’t know most of these sneaky names used to hide the presence of sugar in food and beverages.
The result is this – you’re probably getting dangerously high levels of sugar into your body, and you might not even realize it.
So, what are the 50 ingredients you find on food labels that are just another way of saying “sugar”? Here are 50 of the most common ingredients, which are just different ways of saying “sugar”.
(Actually, there are more than 50! Some nutrition experts believe there could even be as many as 100 different names for sugar that manufacturers use to intentionally mislead you when you’re trying to track sugar content.)
Basic Sugars
1 – Sucrose
2 – Fructose
3 – Galactose
4 – Glucose
5 – Lactose
6 – Maltose
7 – Dextrose
Syrups and Other Liquid Sugars
8 – Agave Nectar, Agave Syrup
9 – Blackstrap Molasses
10 – Buttercream/Buttered Sugar
11 – Carob Syrup
12 – Evaporated Cane Juice
13 – Fruit Juice Concentrate
14 – High Fructose Corn Syrup (H FCS)
15 – Invert Sugar
16 – Maple Syrup
17 – Rice Syrup
18 – Sorghum Syrup
19 – Barley Malt
20 – Brown Rice Syrup
21 – Caramel
22 – Corn Syrup
23 – Fruit Juice
24 – Golden Syrup
25 – Honey
26 – Malt Syrup
27 – Molasses
28 – Refiner’s Syrup
29 – Treacle
Solid, Granulated Sugars
30 – Brown Sugar
31 – Cane Sugar
32 – Coconut Sugar
33 – Corn Syrup Solids
34 – Demerara Sugar
35 – Diastatic Malt
36 – Date Sugar
37 – Golden Sugar
38 – Grape Sugar
39 – Raw Sugar
40 – Florida Crystal
41 – Glucose Syrup Solids
42 – Icing Sugar
43 – Muscovado Sugar
44 – Sucanat
45 – Cane Juice Crystals
46 – Crystalline Fructose
47 – Dextran
48 – Ethyl Maltol
49 – Panela Sugar
50 – Yellow Sugar
You can see in many cases the word sugar is included in the name of the ingredient. Why don’t food manufacturers stop right there? Why do they have to add adjectives or colors or other words to try and confuse you? Who in the world knows what demerara sugar is? Can you tell me what panela sugar is? I didn’t think so.
By the way, a quick way to recognize sugar as an ingredient with some other name or phrase is to look for the ending -ose on a word. Any food ingredient whose spelling ends in -ose is nothing more than refined sugar.
Don’t Trust the Words “Natural” or “Healthy”
Do you ever look for foods that have the word “natural” on the label? A lot of people do. They assume there is some regulation which means you can only include that word if food or its ingredients are made by nature and not by man in some laboratory. It would indicate healthy sugar levels.
You might want to change that practice. In the US (and food regulatory bodies in many other countries), the FDA has not defined what the word “natural” actually means.
This, unfortunately, means the word natural can appear on food without meaning much of anything, such as in the phrase “natural flavors.” That means absolutely nothing. To include the phrase natural flavors, a food simply has to mimic some flavor found in nature.
It can be 100% man-made.
The same is true with the word “healthy.” What is healthy to one person might not be to another, and every person is different physiologically. This means the word healthy can be thrown on any food product without verifiable data to back up that claim.
This is why you must be looking for the many different names for sugar on ingredient labels. It’s the only way you can identify something you know can lead to very serious health problems. Once you start doing this, you might be unpleasantly surprised at how much sugar you and your family have been eating.
At Least 2 out of 3 Bar-Coded Food Products Contain Added Sweeteners
Virta Health reports that 68% of all food products with a barcode in the United States contain added sweeteners. Some of them include quite a great deal of added sugars. Data from other research put that number as high as 75%.
Choose whichever one of those statistics you want to work with. What it means is that the vast majority of the processed food you buy at your favorite grocery store has sweeteners added. What’s the cheapest and most addictive sweetener with the longest shelf life? It’s undeniably refined sugar.
In addition to dropping your sugar intake, you can use food labels to impact your health in another positive way. Stop buying and eating foods that have 10 or 20 or 30 ingredients. The more ingredients listed, the more processed the food is, meaning more meddling by the hands of man.
Eat single-ingredient foods like bananas and apples, grass-fed beef, and wild-caught seafood. You can identify those as food. They are found in nature. Honey Wheat Naturally Flavored Sugar Coated Sugar Cube Cereal is not found in nature! That’s an imaginary cereal I just made up, but you know what I’m getting at.
Eat food you know is real food. Processed food is almost always processed to take out nutrition and add substances that are addictive and make the food last longer on grocery store shelves. Processing almost never happens to make natural food healthier and better for you. Use the list of names for sugar provided above to limit your refined sugar intake and become healthier and happier.
