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You might be avoiding sugar for Lent, health reasons, or just because you’d like to keep off extra weight, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just skipping dessert. There’s sugar in everything from fresh fruit to potato chips, but even with nutrition labels and ingredient lists, it can be difficult to tell which foods you should ban until Easter. Here’s our guide to sussing out the good stuff, and leaving out the bad stuff:
Most of us are aiming to cut out added sugars (the kind in cookies, candy, soft drinks, and cake) not natural sugars. Added sugar (which can come from “natural” sources like sugar cane, brown rice, or agave) typically pack on extra calories and sweet flavor, without adding any other nutritional value. Natural sugars, on the other hand, are found in whole, unprocessed foods which also contain things like fiber, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals — these are much harder to avoid, and are generally considered much healthier than added sugars. (TIP: Don’t let food marketing get you confused; many added sugars come from “natural sources like sugar cane, brown rice, or corn; the problem is that they’ve been extracted from their source and processed so that they don’t contain any other nutritional value.)
To figure out how much added sugar is in your food, you’ll need to look at both the nutrition facts and the ingredient list. Simply checking the carbohydrate or sugar count on the nutrition facts doesn’t paint a full picture: They don’t distinguish between natural and added sugars. The ingredients list can tell you where your sugar is really coming from, but even that’s tricky; some foods list “sugar” on the ingredients list, but it can also come in other forms. Here are some of the other ways that added sugars can appear on your ingredients list:
Dextrose
Lactose
Maltose
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Brown Rice Syrup
Evaporated Cane Juice
Agave Nectar
Some of the above sources are “natural” (like agave syrup, or evaporated cane juice), but they’re still an added sweetener, meaning that they simply add calories and sugar without any other nutritional benefits.
Take a look at the following labels to see what added vs. natural sugar looks like:
These multigrain chips from Food Should Taste Good are full of healthy ingredients (flax, quinoa, and oat fiber) and appear to have very little sugar; only 1g per serving. But on closer inspection of the ingredients list, it turns out that even that tiny amount comes, at least in part, from added sugar, which doesn’t add any nutritional value to the product. (The fat, protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals in the chips all come from other ingredients.)
A Starbucks deluxe fruit blend salad is also full of healthy ingredients (whole fresh fruit), and it doesn’t contain any added sugar, but it does contain far more natural sugar: 19 grams, in total. Natural sugars contain the same number of calories, and still raise your blood sugar, but they come with nutrients, fiber, proteins, and fats that added sugars don’t.
How much sugar you consume is up to you (some diets require extreme restriction of both natural and added sugars; some simply limit your consumption of added sugars), but if you want to watch what you eat, you also need to watch your food labels, and know how to read an ingredients list.
