Finding the hidden sugars

Recently I picked up a popular health bar from a wooden bin at a well-known coffee chain. The bars were labelled in mock handwritten calligraphy to look as if they were baked by a local little old lady. The bar itself practically screamed ‘health food’. The salesperson assured me it was a low-fat, healthy snack.

Then I looked at the label. Here are the real ingredients in that health bar: Sugar (sucrose), rolled oats, dextrose (another sugar), wheat flakes, rice, dried lemon (sulfited), soybeans, fructose (and another), corn syrup (yet another), partially hydrogenated peanut and soybean oil (industrially processed fat), non-fat milk, almonds, malt (more sugar), sorbitol (and yet more) and flavouring.

If you buy that as a health bar, you must be willing to buy almost anything. So, how can you protect yourself, and your family, against unwanted sugar in your diet?
Get label-conscious. By law, a manufacturer has to list the ingredients on a product by weight. Whatever ingredient is listed first is the predominant ingredient in the product. In the case of the above ‘health’ bar, it's a no-brainer, you're eating sugar and processed fats in a warm, fuzzy wrapper.

But food manufacturers are tricky. They know that people are reading labels to find out how much sugar is in the product. So they mix in a small amount of lots of different sugars. That way, no single kind of sugar is the main ingredient by weight. Add them all up, and sugar outweighs anything else in the recipe.

Here are some of the many 'disguises' of sugar:

1. honey,
2. dextrose,
3. fructose,
4. corn syrup,
5. high-fructose corn syrup,
6. sorbitol,
7. fruit juice concentrate,
8. galactose,
9. lactose,
10. polydextrose,
11. mannitol,
12. sorbitol,
13. xylitol,
14. maltodextrin and
15. turbinado sugar.
    

In the past few years, we've been so busy looking at the fat content of our foods that we haven't noticed that a lot of those fat calories have been replaced with equally unhealthy alternatives. Sugar, and ingredients that convert to sugar quickly in the body, raise insulin levels quickly too. Chronically elevated insulin leads to insulin resistance, obesity and, in many cases, diabetes. Is it any wonder that 1.4 million people in the UK now have this awkward and sometimes life-threatening condition?

If you think you don't eat a lot of sugar, it's time to take another look at labels on processed foods. You’ll probably be surprised. The 'real' health food is the kind that you prepare and cook yourself from fresh, preferably organic, ingredients. For an energy giving snack, you’re better off eating a piece of cheddar and an apple or a handful of raw nuts and seeds than a sugary, fatty, over-processed time-bomb in a pretty rustic wrapper.