Know Your Enemy!

An ingredient label might contain no mention of ‘sugar’, but that is actually no guarantee at all. There are lots of substances that taste, act, and affect us in the same way that refined sugar does – just without the name. There are some you will have heard of, like high fructose corn syrup, but that is far from the only example. A prime example from recent years is the misleading labeling of Vitaminwater, which has been persistently promoted as a health food but is in fact quite the opposite.

Here is a list of 56 names for sugar, many of which you might not even recognize. Be sure to look out for them when you next read an ingredient label!

56 NAMES FOR SUGAR
Barley malt	Dehydrated cane juice	Golden sugar	Molasses
Barbados sugar	Demerara sugar	Golden syrup	Muscovado
Beet sugar	Dextran	Grape sugar	Panocha
Brown sugar	Dextrose	High fructose corn syrup	Powdered sugar
Buttered syrup	Diastatic malt	Honey	Raw sugar
Cane juice	Diatase	Icing sugar	Refiner’s syrup
Cane sugar	Ethyl maltol	Invert sugar	Rice syrup
Caramel	Free flowing brown sugars	Lactose	Sorbitol
Corn syrup	Fructose	Malt	Sorghum syrup
Corn syrup solids	Fruit juice	Maltodextrin	Sucrose
Confectioner’s sugar	Fruit juice concentrate	Maltose	Sugar (granulated)
Carob syrup	Galactose	Malt syrup	Treacle
Castor sugar	Glucose	Mannitol	Turbinado sugar
Date sugar	Glucose solids	Maple syrup	Yellow sugar

Some of these you will recognize as sugar, but what about ethyl maltol and maltose? Manufacturers are sneaking these types of sugar into everyday products without the consumer knowing what they are eating or drinking. Even the most health-conscious of us consumes processed foods, even if just on the odd occasion. However if we don’t know what these sugars are called, and what they can do to our bodies, how can we make informed decisions? Is the answer to simply avoid processed foods altogether, or are we simply misunderstanding sugar and the effect it has on us?

The consensus is that it is not the type of sugar you are consuming, but simply the quantities of sugar that are found in processed foods. By using lots of different types and names of sugar, food manufacturers are able to list their sugar contents as lower than if they were to use purely cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup. If they were bundled together these sugars would often be on the top of the ingredients list, but by using several different types they are often hidden further down. We need to become more aware of sugar in our foods, and inspect labels carefully to identify which sugars – and how much of each sugar – are in what we are eating.