Written by Julie Paiva
While many of us immediately associate sugar with foods like candy and soda, sugar is hidden in many things you might be surprised to find it in. Most jarred spaghetti sauces and peanut butters, for example, contain sugar in their ingredients. Unfortunately, now-a-days sugar is added into almost everything that is processed. Added Sugar (including High-Fructose Corn Syrup), has been linked to America’s obesity epidemic as well as a host of other chronic diseases.
This added sugar isn’t as easy to spot as just looking for sugar on the list of ingredients on a packages nutrition label. Sugar comes in many different forms. There are some 257 names for sugar that could be listed on food labels. No matter which name or form of sugar is added in, they all act the same in the body and cause excess weight gain and harm to our health. Below is a list of the most common names for sugar.
When you look for sugar on a nutrition label it is usually listed in grams. It may be hard for most of us to gage what those grams of sugar are equal to. You can remember that 4 grams of sugar is equal to 1 tablespoon. That may help you realize just how much sugar is lurking in some products you commonly use.
Most common names for added sugar:
Sugars with glucose and fructose:
- Sugar/ sucrose
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Agave nectar
- Beet sugar
- Blackstrap molasses
- Brown sugar
- Buttered syrup
- Cane juice crystals
- Cane sugar
- Caramel
- Carob syrup
- Castor sugar
- Coconut sugar
- Confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)
- Date sugar
- Demerara sugar
- Evaporated cane juice
- Florida crystals
- Fruit juice
- Fruit juice concentrate
- Golden sugar
- Golden syrup
- Grape sugar
- Honey
- Icing sugar
- Invert sugar
- Maple syrup
- Molasses
- Muscovado sugar
- Panela sugar
- Raw sugar
- Refiner’s syrup
- Sorghum syrup
- Sucanat
- Treacle sugar
- Turbinado sugar
- Yellow sugar
Sugars with glucose only:
- Barley malt
- Brown rice syrup
- Corn syrup
- Corn syrup solids
- Dextrin
- Dextrose
- Diastatic malt
- Ethyl maltol
- Glucose
- Glucose solids
- Lactose
- Malt syrup
- Maltodextrin
- Maltose
- Rice syrup
Sugars with fructose only:
- Crystalline fructose
- Fructose
If you want to learn more about the dangers of added sugar. Check out the documentary The Secrets of Sugar, https://youtu.be/xDaYa0AB8TQ. Here is also an article from Harvard Medical School about the dangers of sugar in our diet, www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-sweet-danger-of-sugar.
