Sugar Has 56 Different Names
06/01/2015 |
What do corn syrup, evaporated cane juice and agave nectar have in common? They are all names — aliases if you will — for sugar added to foods we eat every day. These include many foods you wouldn’t think of as being sugary: tomato sauce, bread and yogurt, for example.
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, has compiled dozens of these aliases in his recent e-book, Sugar Has 56 Names. The fact is, one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself and your children is to limit sugar consumption. Not only does eating or drinking too much sugar increase the chance of losing permanent teeth; it can also lead to “metabolic syndrome” — a cluster of serious risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and stroke. One definition of metabolic syndrome states that a person must have at least three of the following: high blood pressure, a high blood sugar level, a high triglyceride level (a type of fat in the blood), low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, or excess body fat around the waist.
According to the National Institutes of Health, your risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke increases with the number of metabolic risk factors you have. In general, a person who has metabolic syndrome is twice as likely to develop heart disease and five times as likely to develop diabetes as someone who doesn’t have metabolic syndrome.
Dr. Lustig is quick to point out that you don’t have to be overweight to have metabolic syndrome; it actually affects up to 40% of normal weight people. In other words, sugar overload is everybody’s problem.
The American Heart Association says Americans consume about 22 teaspoons of sugar per day, when the maximum should be 9 teaspoons for adult men (about the amount in a can of soda), 6 for adult women, and 4 for children. These limits apply only to added sugar — not what occurs naturally in fruits, vegetables and milk. But limiting added sugar is no easy task, given how many foods contain it and the lengths to which the food industry goes to disguise it. That’s why Dr. Lustig has compiled this list of sugar’s 56 names. Study it, and let the buyer beware!
Sugar’s Many Aliases:
- Agave nectar
- Barbados sugar
- Barley malt
- Beet sugar
- Blackstrap molasses
- Brown rice syrup
- Brown sugar
- Buttered syrup
- Cane juice crystals
- Cane sugar
- Caramel
- Carob syrup
- Castor sugar
- Confectioner’s sugar
- Corn syrup
- Corn syrup solids
- Crystalline fructose
- Date sugar
- Demerara sugar
- Dextran
- Dextrose
- Diastatic malt
- Diatase
- Ethyl maltol
- Evaporated cane juice
- Florida crystals
- Fructose
- Fruit juice
- Fruit juice concentrate
- Galactose
- lucose
- Glucose solids
- Golden sugar
- Golden syrup
- Grape sugar
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Honey
- Icing sugar
- Invert sugar
- Lactose
- Malt syrup
- Maltose
- Maple syrup
- Molasses
- Muscovado sugar
- Organic raw sugar
- Panocha
- Raw sugar
- Refiner’s syrup
- Rice syrup
- Sorghum syrup
- Sucrose
- Sugar
- Treacle
- Turbinado sugar
- Yellow sugar
No comments:
Post a Comment