Sweet Duplicity

How can one hide sugar?  I mean, where there is sugar, there are ants, right?  (I wonder if ants differentiate between table sugar, high fructose corn syrup and honey?)  And more importantly, how to bust sugar or cut down your sugar intake when it’s hidden?  If you know the manufacturer’s tricks, you will at least know where the sugar is and in what quantity.  (Tomorrow I’ll have a few tips and recipes for decreasing your sugar intake.  First step – know where it’s hiding!)

1. One way to hide sugar from consumers is simply to use a chemical name that people might not recognize as sugar.
2. Another way is to put sugar into products where you’d least expect to find it.
3. Yet another way (these folks are sneaky people): Because ingredients are listed in order of highest content to lowest content, if a manufacturer uses all one type of sugar then sugar will be higher in the ingredient list than might appear ‘healthy.’  So the manufacturers use different forms of sugar so that no one type of sugar is as high in the ingredient list as would be the actual total of sweetener.
4.  And lastly, if you label the product ‘healthy’ despite a ton of sugar, then maybe people won’t check for or worry about the high sugar content.

So first off, here is a list of names of sugar:
Agave nectar
Brown sugar
Cane crystals
Cane sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Crystalline fructose
Dextrose
Evaporated cane juice
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrates
Glucose
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Invert sugar
Lactose
Maltose
Malt syrup
Molasses
Raw sugar
Sucrose
Sugar
Syrup
Again, a manufacturer can use a combination of these sugars so that sugar does not appear to be as dominant an ingredient.  Also know that although it can be argued that honey has some beneficial qualities not possessed by table sugar and high fructose corn syrup has a slightly worse effect on the body than table sugar… all of these are sugar and too much sugar is very bad for you (see Little Sis’ post about the 60 Minutes article on sugar featuring a well-respected MD.)

Check the labels on some products in your pantry that you would think would contain no sugar.  Got any jarred spaghetti sauce in there?  How about peanut butter?  Crackers, soup, bread, salad dressing, ketchup, not to mention your breakfast cereal?  They are putting sugar in lots of places!  And the more sugar you eat, the more sugar you want and the less sweet sugar tastes.  You get used to the high sugar content and something like a strawberry no longer tastes sweet and so lots of people put sugar on their strawberries.

I used to love Kashi Go-Lean Crunch cereal.  It’s healthy, right?  It says so right on the box, right?  Yeah and you know why it tastes so good?  One serving has 13 grams of sugar.  That’s just under 3 teaspoons.  Can you imagine adding 3 teaspoons of sugar into your cereal bowl?  The point is that just because it has other good qualities (like high fiber and protein) doesn’t mean there isn’t a bunch of sugar as well.  And it doesn’t mean that they don’t know the trick of using several sugars.  Kashi uses evaporated cane juice crystals, brown rice syrup and honey.  If you added all of those together as ‘sugar’ – it would land higher on the ingredient list than any of them do as single ingredients.

So if you would like to reduce your sugar intake, you must be aware of the ways that manufacturers hide sugar content.  They want you to eat it, like it, buy it again and eat it some more.  And sugar is incredibly conducive to this business plan.  When we eat it, we like it and we buy it again.  We eat it some more, and some more, and some more.  Tell us where you find unexpected sugar!  I found some in a hug from my eleven year old ‘cool dude’ this morning.  Now that’s a sweet way to start the morning.

Traveling Beverages

Is it some kind of foul and evil experiment involving old jars, a Coleman cooler and evil chemicals?  Are Little Sis and I analyzing the contents of Coca Cola?  Naaah!  That’s already been done!

It’s much tamer than that.  And although I am guessing that it is not high etiquette to use one’s blog in a self aggrandizing or self congratulatory way….. I’m going to do it anyway!  Actually, I’m sure you’ll forgive or even laugh at me because it’s such a small accomplishment that it’s hardly worth any praise.  However, it is one of those tasks that has been on my ‘to-do’ list for a long time.

I am not a caffeine-drinker, but when we travel I need a little help to keep eyes on the road and wheels within the lane markers.  My drink of choice at this point is some iced tea.  It does not cause my heart to speed up or skip a few beats as does caffeinated coffee, but gives enough boost to keep us safe in the car.

Convenience store at the gas station, here we come.  Just don’t check out the labels on your average bottle or can of iced tea.  It’s a little scary.  (And of course I hope you do check the labels!)  Even Arizona tea with the wonderful Asian symbols and natural sounding flavors like green tea with ginseng and honey has high fructose corn syrup in it.  In fact HFCS is the second ingredient in that flavor, honey is the third and it also lists ‘natural flavors’ as an ingredient.  I promise not to dwell too long on this, but McDonald’s sweet tea does not even achieve a first or second place listing for tea.  The first ingredient is water, the second sugar and the third is tea.  There are 45 grams of sugar in a medium (21fl oz) McDonald’s sweet tea.  Suffice it to say, that the teas available to me as I travel all have sugar in various guises.  And lots of it.  So I’ve been saving bottles, both from the tea I’ve chosen over a nasty high speed collision, and anything else that is conducive to drinking and storing, with the intention of making my own iced tea and taking it on the road!

I finally did it!  As you can see in the picture above it was indeed a motley collection of bottles / jars (minus the one we drank on the first leg of the journey) filled with home brewed black tea and 1 tablespoon of sugar in what turned out to be about a half gallon of tea.  In comparison to McDonald’s sweet tea that’s 4.5 grams of sugar in 21 oz. rather than 45.  Mind you this tea was not sweet to speak of, but it tasted great, did the job and removed the repugnant necessity of giving my money to companies that make crappy products albeit in the name of highway safety.

So yeah for me!  Self congratulation done and there is plenty of tea left for the return trip as well.  Next hurdle…. the free breakfast in the hotel that has waffles that come from a pourable carton and Fruit Loops.   Ahhhhhhhh!