Hidden Sugars in Your Favorite Foods

By Kai Colvin - Senior Medical Research Editor | June 1st, 2012

Hide and seek used to be just for kids—but in today’s society sugar has us playing this childhood favorite almost every day.

On average, an individual consumes roughly 1,500 pounds of food every year. A grueling 160 of those 1,500 pounds are predominantly sugar.

While sugar is profusely proclaimed to stricken our nutritive values, what do you know about molasses, honey, high fructose corn syrup, glucose, fructose, lactose, dextrose, sucrose, or even maltose?

We all know sugar is appealing, however, except for the energy it channels, there’s not much to endorse about sugar. In fact, it’s a major source for empty calories.

Sugar is found in astonishing numbers of savory foods—and openly labeled.

So, what’s the problem? Regardless of how well we try to eliminate excess sugar from our diet, food manufactures have engaged in a hide and seek method—slipping in the sugar where we would never think to look.

Guidelines acclaim that ‘added’ sugars shouldn’t make up more than 10% of the total energy we ingest from food.

So, what should we be looking for? The two most collective forms of unhealthy additives are sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup.

“Added sugars are more likely to do harm as they aren’t safely bound in the structure of a food, as they are in fruit,” states British Dietetic Association, Sasha Watkins. “It means they are available to the body in higher concentrations,” Watkins added.

Our body turns excess sugar into fat, which is stored around the major organs. This puts us in harm’s way of serious health risks including liver disease and heart disease.

The biggest threats—oatmeal, salad dressing, tomato sauce, soft drinks, protein bars, ketchup, peanut butter, milk, canned fruits and low-fat products (where sugar has been added to make up for the reduction of fat).

FINDING HIDDEN SUGAR - Read the label carefully—under carbohydrates, you will find the sugar ingredients and the amount added.

To reduce the amount of hidden sugar intake, limit processed foods and regulate the portion sizes of foods that have added sugars.

Ready or not, the biggest part of the game is meticulously controlling what you put in your body.

To learn more about the effects of hidden sugars, find a doctor near you.