Sugar is playing hide and seek with you. You’d think that it would pretty easy for you to win considering all the sugar in soft drinks, ice cream, candy and big white bags labelled “sugar”. People get about half their added sugar from those drinks and treats so it might seem like sugar is hiding in plain sight but the other half is hidden in places that you least expect.
Hidden Sugar
Check the ingredients on ketchup, spaghetti sauce, soy milk, sports drinks and peanut butter. You’ll find sugar hiding in most of those products. You’ll find added sugar in three quarters of the more than six hundred thousand items in supermarkets. But how is sugar hiding? Can’t you just look on food labels?
It’s not that easy. Added sugar has a lot of aliases, not just 5 or 6, but 56 – there’s brown rice syrup, barley malt, high fructose corn syrup otherwise known as HFCS or corn sugar. Even sugars with tricky nicknames have nicknames. Grape or apple concentrate has the same effect on your body as its fifty five sugar twins. And even though organic evaporated cane juice sounds healthy, when you evaporate it, you get sugar. Chemically speaking it’s all the same.
Even trickier, when multiple types of sugar are used in one product, they get buried down in a long list of ingredients. So the sugar content might appear to be ok, but when you add them all together, sugar could be the single biggest ingredient.
What is Sugar?
What is sugar? What’s the difference between glucose and fructose? Both are carbohydrates with the same chemical composition of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen but they have very different structures and behave quite differently in our bodies.
Glucose is the best source of energy for nearly all organisms on Earth. It can be metabolised by all organs in the body. Fructose on the other hand, is metabolised primarily in the liver. When the liver gets overloaded with sweet, sweet fructose, the excess is metabolised into fat. Fresh fruits actually contain fructose, but it is naturally occurring and doesn’t cause an overload as the fibre in fruit slows its absorption. This gives your liver the time to do its job.
Whilst fructose and high fructose corn syrups are commonly used as sweeteners in the U.S, it is not commonly used in the Australian food supply. In Australia, the main source of sugar in the diet is from sugar cane which is added to foods. Sucrose is widely used in processed foods and drinks as a sweetener as well as acting as a flavour enhancer and a preservative.
Why we use Sugar
It is sugar which makes cookies chewy, and candy crunchy. It even turns bread crust a beautiful golden brown. It is also a great preservative. It doesn’t spoil or evaporate so the foods it is added to are easier to store and ship long distances and tends to be cheaper. That’s why sugar is hiding everywhere.
Added Sugar and Our Health
Australian dietary guidelines recommend restricting added sugars. There are many links between added sugars with dental caries and weight gain.
Dietary sugars such as glucose, sucrose and lactose, can cause dental caries as these sugars are converted into acid metabolites. This means the more frequently foods containing added sugar are eaten, the greater the risk of caries as our teeth aren’t given the chance to remineralise. The acidity of sweetened drinks also plays a role, and includes sugar-sweetened or diet soft drinks.
Weight gain associated with sugar-sweetened drinks is believed to be caused by the reduced sense of fullness when a sugary drink is consumed. This is because many foods containing added sugars, whilst being energy-dense, are low in nutrients.
Recommended Sugar Intake
The evidence currently available is not enough to provide an exact recommendation of how much added sugar to have in our diet. The World Health Organisation recommends limiting sugar to just ten percent of your total energy intake, which is equivalent to around 50g or 12 level teaspoons for a person with healthy body weight. Ideally, less than five percent of total energy intake is required for additional health benefits. Nutritionally though, you don’t need to have any added sugar for good health.
Where Isn’t Sugar hiding?
Added sugar isn’t hiding in vegetables, eggs, meats, fish, fruit, raw nuts and water. Simply choosing water of soda, juices or sports drinks is a great way to avoid hidden added sugar. At the very least, pay attention to food labels so you can keep your sugar intake at a healthy level.
In this game of hide and seek, every time you don’t find added sugar, you win.
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