Continuing this series, The 4 Horseman of the Foodocolypse, today’s post looks into the next item to avoid in order to live a more exciting life full of possibilities. The last post looked at Horseman #2 – Processed Foods. Today’s looks at one of the most dangerous of processed foods: processed sugar.
Sugar is sneaky. You’d be surprised where you can find it. Let’s look at 8 items: Whole grain bread, Turkey bacon, Kidney beans, Peanut butter, Special K. and a few others. What percentage of these do you think have sugar in them?
Whether you struggle with math or not, this one is easy: 100% of these have added sugar in them. Personally I have gone down the Walmart cereal aisle with 100 or so cereals, I only found 2 that didn’t have added sugar. In Target, looking at all the peanut butters, out of 30 odd kinds including those that are labeled “organic” or “natural”, I only found 1 that didn’t have added sugar.
So how do you spot the sugar? There are over 40 names of sugar, so it’s not so easy, but here are 6 easy rules to spot the sugar. To find almost all sugars, you simply want to look for these:
- Sugar. Now this sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised what sugars you’d find, such as beet sugar and castor sugar.
- Syrup. This includes anything with syrup in the name like corn syrup, malt syrup, and the infamous high fructose corn syrup.
- Juice. Anything with juice in the name is a sugar such as fruit juice or cane juice.
- Dextr—. This and the next are a little more difficult, but they’re not too bad. Watch out for anything with “dextr” in the name such as dextran, dextrose, and maltodextrin.
— - ose. Anything that ends in “ose” such as fructose or glucose.
- Don’t forget the Obvious. Finally, don’t forget the obvious ones such as carmel, honey, and molasses
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We’ve covered the sneakiest of the horsemen. The next post will look at the the most obvious: fried foods.
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