Natural Vs Added Sugars 🍰🍫🍬

Sugar is a crystalline carbohydrate that enhances flavors by providing sweetness to foods and beverages. Sugars can either be naturally occurring such as fructose (found in fruit) or lactose (found in dairy) or added sugars. American’s tend to consume a lot of added sugars from consuming regular soft drinks, fruit drinks, candy, cakes, cookies, ice cream, sugary cereals, ext. Finding those pesky hidden sugars: It can be difficult to determine the difference between a food item containing natural or added sugars. This is because the food label groups those together and just lists “sugars”. If a food item contains milk or fruit then you can safely assume that it contains some natural sugars in the form of fructose or lactose. However that does not mean that it also doesn’t contain added sugars. You can determine if the items also contains added sugars by looking at the ingredients list. However this can be tricky as they can be listed in terms that make the sugars appear undercover. Here is a list of some items that can often be found on ingredient lists that are essentially added sugar: 

Names for added sugars on labels include:

Brown sugar Corn sweetener & corn syrup Fruit juice concentrates High-fructose corn syrup Honey Invert sugar Malt sugar Molasses Raw sugar Sugar Sugar molecules ending in “ose” (dextrose,, glucose, maltose, sucrose) Syrup

The American Heart Association recommends limiting the amount of added sugars you consume to be no more than 6 teaspoons per day for women and 9 teaspoons per day for men. Sugars may not be harmful if you’re not a diabetic, however they do contribute additional empty calories with no nutritional benefit. The amounts of added sugars found in foods and fluids have steadily increased and relates directly to our increased rate of obesity in the United States. By reducing the amount of added sugars we eat; we in turn reduce the calories consumed and can help you improve heart health and weight maintenance.