Don’t Be Fooled: 56 Ways You’re Lied To About Sugar

“A sugar with any other name tastes just as sweet” – notShakespeare

My biggest trigger-food is without a doubt high-sugar foods. This, as you can probably guess, is the worst news to hear when you are an unashamed sugar addict, perpetually found with a biscuit tin beside the bed and cookie crumbs constantly decorating your décolletage.

Avoiding sugar is no mean feat, and food manufacturers like to make it ever harder for us. If it’s not already listed on the packet as one of the main ingredients, it’s being digested as glucose in the body (I’m talking carbs and other starchy foods), which causes the same spike in sugar levels that raw sugar would.

But I came across an article the other day which told me that – rather than sugar being plain in site in your local supermarket, it couldn’t be more hidden if it tried. It cites how it is the food manufacturers main goal to promote their product, if not for being a health product, but for it not seeming as bad as it could (because, generally, these products are really bad for you). So they mask over the main ball-breakers – the salt, sugar and fat in their products – and give them fancier names that make no sense to the average consumer.

The top three ingredients in a product’s list are the ones which matter the most as ingredients are listed in order of their proportion in the product – surprisingly not many consumers know this and it’s quite worrisome that they’re happy to be misled. So marketers move away from calling sugar it’s name… they call it other chemically-sounding names like sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids and dextrose to name a few, put loads of different sounding sugar ingredients into the product, and distribute their amounts loosely throughout the product so that these sugar components – whilst taking up a large proportion of the product – don’t have to feature in the top three.

There are actually, in total, 56 ways sugar can be described not just as strictly ‘sugar’ on food packaging, with a whopping 38 not even stating ‘sugar’ at all in their description.

Below you’ll see a fully comprehensive list of all the ways sugar can be described on food packaging. If it’s not noted as a ‘fruit’s sugar’ i.e. grape sugar (which is still just pure sugar), then it’s labelled as ‘syrup’ or a chemical ending –ose… these all sound very different, but are in effect the same thing and are digested in the same way as the regular, basic ‘sugar’ you see glittering within a digestive biscuit.

So be careful – and keep a watchful eye of any of these ingredients creeping into the ingredients list of your favourite foods.

1. Barley malt
2. Barbados sugar
3. Beet sugar
4. Brown sugar
5. Buttered syrup
6. Cane juice
7. Cane sugar
8. Caramel
9. Corn syrup
10. Corn syrup solids
11. Confectioner’s sugar
12. Carob syrup
13. Castor sugar
14. Date sugar
15. Dehydrated cane juice
16. Demerara sugar
17. Dextran
18. Dextrose
19. Diastatic malt
20. Diatase
21. Ethyl maltol
22. Free Flowing Brown Sugars
23. Fructose
24. Fruit juice
25. Fruit juice concentrate
26. Galactose
27. Glucose
28. Glucose solids
29. Golden sugar
30. Golden syrup
31. Grape sugar
32. High fructose corn syrup
33. Honey
34. Icing sugar
35. Invert sugar
36. Lactose
37. Malt
38. Maltodextrin
39. Maltose
40. Malt syrup
41. Mannitol
42. Maple syrup
43. Molasses
44. Muscovado
45. Panocha
46. Powdered Sugar
47. Raw sugar
48. Refiner’s syrup
49. Rice syrup
50. Sorbitol
51. Sorghum syrup
52. Sucrose
53. Sugar (granulated)
54. Treacle
55. Turbinado sugar
56. Yellow sugar