As a matter of fact, hidden sugar can be in nearly anything store-bought, much more than you would expect. It is used in breads and fast foods, of course, but it is also a hidden ingredient in all kinds of dressings, sauces, and yogurts.
Cheaper sauces, like canned tomato sauce or pesto, use sweeteners as a way of shortcutting the slow cooking necessary to reduce the acrid sour taste in vegetables, which only breaks down normally through a more laborious process and demands a more careful and thoughtful cook.
For other foods, it can be common for foods to not list plain sugar in their ingredients list, but if you were to look more carefully, you’ll find that many sweeteners listed digest as glucose in the body, despite being listed as things like “fructose”, “invert sugar”, or “golden syrup”.
With blood sugar being such a major component of health, it can be difficult to cut your daily sugar intake without knowing how to avoid these tricky hidden sugars, and so I’m here to go over some of the major ways to eat more thoughtfully and consume your daily serving of sugars and carbohydrates with intention, rather than it sneaking up on you.
The first step of avoiding hidden sugars is to understand the many ways that basic sugar – glucose – presents itself in the world. Glucose is the simplest carbohydrate, being a nutrient particle that we, as well as pretty much every single living organism on this planet, thrive off of. Our brains are the main consumers of glucose, burning through more sugar than any other part of our body and needing the purest and more basic form of energy to function. Because of this, it is impossible to cut all carbohydrates and sugars from our diet completely. We need them to survive and thrive as human beings.
That being said, while we need them, sugar in excess creates elevated blood sugar levels, which is damaging to cells on the long term, and the overabundance of sweeteners messes with satiety signals and hormones that tell your body when it is full and when it’s time to stop eating. For this reason, it is vital to recognise all the ways that sugar presents itself in the food we buy, especially because it can be pretty common for labels to not simply say “sugar” on the back. Anything with the ending of -cose can be pretty reliably identified as a more complex particle that is made, in part, of sugar.
For example: fructose is a sugar derived from fruit and vegetables, like sugar beets and sugar canes; lactose is a difficult to digest form of sugar found in dairy products; and maltose is a sugar produced by the breakdown of malt carbohydrates. Despite all of these scientific terms, if a food item lists anything that ends with -cose, it is safe to say that this is a hidden sugar, which will digest into glucose in your body just the same.
Another way that companies will sneak sweeteners in is by adding them as part of a more complex ingredient, like syrups and extracts. Maple syrup and high fructose corn syrup are easy enough to identify, but how about fruit juice, or barley malt? Rice syrup or panela? Yes, these are all ways to concentrate syrup (in essence, sugars) from sources that don’t immediately read to the average consumer as being pure, unrefined sugars that will digest into glucose all the same. With these types of tricks, the names and sources of sweeteners can be as numerous as the carbohydrates that sugars can be synthesised from – essentially, it’s endless.
So, rather than simply looking at the ingredients list and calling it a day if you don’t see “sugar” listed, look further, at the dietary information next to the ingredients and beneath the serving size. Alongside carbohydrates and proteins, you should be able to find a list of “total sugar”, which, if the manufacturers are following procedure, should include all of the potential sugars digested from the carbohydrates if one subtracts the fibre. This should, in theory, reflect a much more realistic total of the amount of glucose hidden in the product.
As stated previously, artificial sweeteners are not a perfect solution to hidden sugars in and of themselves, having their own detrimental effect on our bodies. Some sugar alcohols (some common sugar alcohols are sorbitol, maltitol, and xylitol, all sweeteners used in many types of food, from peanut butter to chewing gum), which is a type of sweetener derived from carbohydrates that tastes sweet and is low in carb, have been found to mess with digestion when eaten in excess.
When we eat sweet things, our bodies expect to receive high caloric food items that will make us full for a long time – so when we then eat a low carb food that doesn’t have those valuable nutrients, it can confuse our digestive tracts, leading to long-term problems. Likewise, sweeteners like maltodextrin can still lead to elevated blood sugar levels. Not as high as eating foods that are high in sugar, but still to a significant extent. With these types of artificial sugars found commonly in yogurts and spreads, it is just as important to keep an eye out for them.
So, now that we understand the science behind hidden sugars and how to spot them in our foods, where are they used most commonly? Some are easy to spot, especially when it comes to highly processed foods, but others are much trickier. Products that advertise themselves as being low fat, for example, often times just replaced the fat with higher sugar content, meaning that they’ll be less satisfying and just as unhealthy. When it comes to canned foods, also, the preservation process might rob the food items of their natural flavour, which is then covered up with the addition of extra hidden sugars so that you don’t notice it as much, and a similar technique goes for preserved fruit, which is canned in sugar syrup. Another odd place to find hidden sugars? Cigarettes! If you didn’t have reason enough to quit smoking, one cigarette can have as much as 1⁄2 teaspoon of sugar, which isn’t a lot but can mount up depending on how much you smoke. Also demonstrates how sugars can be hidden in very plain sight, and to great harm when consumed unknowingly.