Dr. Macklin Talks Added Sugar - the Processed Food Industry's Addictive Secret

Eating healthy is never completely easy.  Discriminating between decent and disastrous processed food is tough.

You know what you are eating when you eat an orange, a vegetable, a piece of fish or even a one-ingredient whole grain cereal. Almost everything else seems to depend on your skill of decoding a long ingredient list with multiple syllable words that sound more chemical than food. Worse yet, some ingredient lists are designed to mislead and confuse.

Sweet and Delicious?

The most hidden and confusing ingredient in processed food is sugar. Sugar is the most compelling ingredient to the human palate. Sugar is the single most addictive food and even more so when combined with fat.

By adding sugar into processed foods, the food industry is able to hook you into eating and buying more of, say, a breakfast cereal, a frozen dinner or a condiment. The more sugar that is added into a food, the more likely that food is to have an addictive capacity, affecting a conditioned response in your brain to crave more and eat more and subsequently gain weight.

So how can the food industry add hidden sugar to a food? A food manufacturer is required to list all ingredients found in a food in descending order by weight. The heaviest amount of any food is listed first, the next second, etc. If a ton of sugar has been added to a food you would expect to see sugar high on the ingredient list. So here is the most common smokescreen used to hide sugar: A food manufacturer can add sugar with different names.

By Any Other Name, it Tastes Just as Sweet

With many different types of sugar, each escapes the name “sugar” and the weight of sugar is spread lower on the list. The name sugar only applies to table sugar or sucrose.  Yet, added sugar by any other name still tastes as sweet.  Other names (to name but a few) include corn syrup, fructose, glucose, honey, high corn fructose corn syrup, lactose, malt, maple syrup, syrup, molasses, rice syrup, cane juice crystals, cane sugar, caramel, dextran, fruit juice, inverted sugar and mannitol.  Each can be listed separately.  The weight of each may be small enough to show up sixth, seventh or eighth on the list but add them up and the that can be a lot of sugar!

Lets take an example of one popular cereal that is marketed as a healthy way to start your day. In fact the bowl on the cereal box is in the shape of a heart and the words Smart Start and Strong Heart are prominent on the box as well. The ingredients are listed like this:

OAT BLEND (WHOLE OATS, OAT BRAN), RICE, SUGAR, MAPLE AND BROWN SUGAR FLAVORED OAT CLUSTERS (SUGAR, TOASTED OATS [ROLLED WHOLE OATS, SUGAR, CANOLA OIL WITH TBHQ AND CITRIC ACID TO PRESERVE FRESHNESS, MOLASSES, HONEY, BHT FOR FRESHNESS, SOY LECITHIN], WHEAT FLAKES, CRISP RICE [RICE, SUGAR, MALT, SALT], CORN SYRUP, POLYDEXTROSE, HONEY, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, CINNAMON, BHT FOR FRESHNESS, ARTIFICIAL VANILLA FLAVOR), HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, MALT FLAVORING, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, SALT, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, BAKING SODA, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), NIACINAMIDE, ZINC OXIDE, CALCIUM PANTOTHENATE, REDUCED IRON, VITAMIN D, ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), BHT (PRESERVATIVE), PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), RIBOFLAVIN (VITAMIN B2), THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), BETA CAROTENE (A SOURCE OF VITAMIN A), FOLIC ACID, VITAMIN B12.

That’s a whole lot of added sugar!  Again why does this matter?  According to the 2009 “Dietary sugars intake and cardiovascular health: a scientific statement form the American Heart Association” published in the medical journal “Circulation”, North Americans are taking in 22 teaspoons a day of  added sugars! That adds up to over 300 calories per day (300 calories per day adds 36 pounds of fat a year)!  Most added sugars come from processed and prepared foods. Again, the more sugar added, the more addictive qualities the food possess, the more likely you are to overeat it and gain weight

How to Avoid Sugars

So in a world where sugary cereals are checked as smart choices, what are you, the consumer to do?  Consider my rules list for avoiding added sugar.

1)    Be wary of any product that has greater than 5 grams of sugar per 100 calories.

2)    Remember that fruit, milk and other natural foods don’t have added sugar.

3)    Don’t buy products where sugar is the first or second ingredient.

4)    Stay away from products that have different names for sugar sprinkled through their ingredient list.

Good luck. Like I said, it is tough out there. If this sounds overwhelming, remember that most health savvy eaters learn a series of healthy products and stick to them, slowly adding products that fit their rule list over time for variety. Personally, I eat a number of whole grain cereals with fruit and nuts for breakfast every day. Added sugar = zero. Now that’s a smart start!

David A. Macklin MD CCFP