
You can use sugars to help enhance your diet. Adding a limited amount of sugar to improve the taste of foods (especially for children) that provide important nutrients, such as whole-grain cereal, low-fat milk or yogurt, is better than eating nutrient-poor, highly sweetened foods.
However, here are some products that you may not realize have added sugar (or rather the amount that they contain!): breakfast cereals, granola, oatmeal, protein bars, pasta sauces, canned soup, ketchup & BBQ sauces, gravy, salad dressing, coleslaw, bread & sandwiches, peanut butter, vitamin water, yogurt .. (more here!)
The next time you’re picking up a pre-made item from the grocery store, check the ingredients for the following: Anhydrous dextrose, brown sugar, cane crystals, cane sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, crystal dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose sweetener, fruit juice concentrates, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, liquid fructose, malt syrup, maple syrup, molasses, pancake syrup, raw sugar, sugar, syrup, white sugar, fructose, lactose, maltose, carbitol, concentrated fruit juice, corn sweetener, diglycerides, disaccharides, evaporated cane juice, erythritol, Florida crystals, fructooligosaccharides, galactose, glucitol, glucoamine, hexitol, inversol, isomalt, maltodextrin, malted barley, malts, mannitol, nectars, pentose, raisin syrup, ribose rice syrup, rice malt, rice syrup solids, sorbitol, sorghum, sucanat, sucanet, xylitol and zylose.
I know. That’s a big list.
One other thing to pay attention to: ingredients are listed by weight from most to least. So, the higher that a sweetener is in the ingredients list, the more that there is within it.