Finding hidden sugars in common foods

Avoiding sugar can be tricky, since sugars hide in all sorts of prepared foods where you hardly expect to find them. These insidious sweeteners include ordinary table sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and artificial sweeteners such as Splenda (sucralose), plus so-called healthy sweeteners like evaporated or dehydrated cane juice and honey.

It’s no surprise to find sweeteners in cold drinks, breakfast cereals, and desserts, but did you imagine that fried clams or “sweet” peas need added sugar to taste good? Take a look at this list of common supermarket prepared foods containing sweeteners:

Many supermarket breads and crackers contain sugar or HFCS. But even in handmade, whole-grain loaves from health food stores, you’ll often find honey or evaporated cane juice. “Putting sweetener in bread just gives you a double whammy,” cautions Ming. “Since bread flour turns into glucose in your body, you’re actually getting two sugar hits. And it’s the same with putting sweetened tomato sauce on top of pasta.”

Lots of prepared “healthy” products are sweetened just as much as supermarket brands. Check the labels on your next trip to the health food store: your eyes will open wide. A few examples:

You may think the “healthy” sweeteners in these foods are OK. But Ming’s take is: “They’re still sugar!” Sweeteners like honey and evaporated cane juice cause the same spike in your blood glucose as plain old refined sugar. Their only advantage is that they do contain some nutrients.

Still, most of us just love that sweet taste and can’t give it up completely. So Ming recommends a bit of a compromise: consume some “healthy” sweeteners, once in a while, and in moderation. That will satisfy your sweet craving in the least harmful way.

For more on why these sweeteners aren’t really better than table sugar, check out Connie Bennett’s blog. Bennett, author of the book Sugar Shock!, is a former sugar addict herself, and she knows what she’s talking about.

Other types of products to watch out for:

Low-fat anything. By definition, low-fat means high-sugar (and so does fat-free). To compensate for the absence of fat, the manufacturers of products like Tasti Delite and Snackwell’s load them with sweetener.

Vegan desserts. Maybe you thought “vegan” was about as pure as you could get. Actually, these products also really overdo the sweetener. To avoid animal ingredients, they contain vegetable oil, which can’t match the luscious texture of butter. In order to create something that resembles a real cake or cookie, the producers compensate by using large amounts of honey or organic cane sugar, then pretend the results are healthy. But they’ll create the same inflammation and pain as any other sugar.

Diet or nutrition drinks. Huge amounts of sugar are used to make these products palatable. Sugar is a main ingredient both of Ensure, a high-nutrient drink, and of Slim Fast, whose Creamy Milk Chocolate Shake lists sugar as the third ingredient. If you consume these products, you might get  a few extra nutrients, or lose some weight. But you’ll also be jacking up your blood sugar and asking for inflammation.
The takeway here is: read the labels of everything you buy. You’ll get a real education, and you’ll help keep your fascia happy.

Next: what is high fructose corn syrup, and why is it so addictive?

Did You Know: Sugar Creates Inflammation—and Pain

No doubt you’re aware that sugar isn’t good for you. It’s bad for your teeth, adds weight, and leads to childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes.

But there’s another, little-known reason to avoid sugar: it injures your fascia.

Sugar promotes inflammation in your tissues, leading to fascial and muscular pain.

All types of tissue, and particularly the fascia, are susceptible to glycation, a pathological process that occurs when there are high levels of sugar in the blood, above what is needed for metabolism. The excess sugar has nowhere to go, so it attaches to a protein molecule, destroying the protein’s normal structure and making it very stiff. The body sees the new, combined molecule as a foreign object and creates an inflammatory response to get rid of it.

This inflammatory response occurs all over the body. You may not notice that your fascia has gotten stiffer. But if you get a massage and it hurts wherever the therapist touches you, you know that your entire body is inflamed.

If you have this kind of overall low-level inflammation under normal circumstances, imagine what happens when you’re injured. Right—the pain is worse. If you eat a lot of sugar, an injured shoulder will be more painful and have less range of motion than if you didn’t.

Let’s make it clear what “sugar” is. It’s not just the white stuff you put in coffee. It’s not even just soft drinks, candy, and cake. Sugar as you don’t know it is any form of carbohydrate. That means bread, pasta, whole grains, potatoes—and especially fruit, which seems to cause about 10 times as much glycation as sugar from other sources.

All the carbohydrates you eat are converted into glucose, which goes into your bloodstream to fuel your body. However, some carbohydrates put more glucose in your blood than others. When that happens, you get a glucose spike, and more of it goes into glycation instead of being used as fuel.

If you have pain right now, try following Ming’s principle: minimize all carbs, and for those you do eat, avoid the simple ones like table sugar and white bread. Stick to carbs that are more slowly absorbed: eat whole grains like brown rice instead of bread, whole grain bread over white bread.

“I always ask my patients about their diet,” says Ming, “and 90 percent eat a high-carb diet—which in my definition means having carbs every time you eat. Based on my experience, it’s safe to say that a hi-carb diet will make your pain worse than it has to be. My patients come in with aches and pains all over. They get off sugar—which is to say, carbs—and the pain goes away. Then they go back to eating sugar, and the pain returns.”

Sources
DeGroot, J. "The AGE of the Matrix: Chemistry, Consequence, Cure." Curr. Opin. Pharmacology 2004 June 4 (3) 301-5.
McPherson JD, Shilton BH, Walton DJ. "Role of fructose in glycation and cross-linking of proteins." Biochemistry 1988;27:1901-7.