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May 04, 2023

Types of Sugar: More Than 50 Natural, Added, and Artificial Sweeteners

It’s been a rough decade for sugar. The sweet stuff has a dark side, as emerging

It's been a rough decade for sugar. The sweet stuff has a dark side, as emerging research suggests it may play a role in weight gain, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and liver disease.

While it's not all bad, most people are eating waaaay too much. The typical American eats 17 teaspoons of added sugar every day. That adds up to… wait for it… 57 pounds of added sugar per year!

That's about 1/3 cup per day, in case you’d prefer to just scoop it out of the bag and eat it by the spoonful, Mary Poppins-style.

And while research suggests that sugar consumption has been decreasing across the board, cutting added sugar can be really difficult because it has about a billion ingredient label aliases that allow it to slide by undetected.

Here's a guide to what exactly added sugar is, the many names for added sugar, and some easy ways to cut your added sugar intake.

Let's go to sugar school real quick. Carbohydrates are made of long chains of individual sugar molecules. (Yup, even the carbs in foods that don't taste sweet, like potatoes, pasta, and rice.)

Here are the key players:

For a fun science experiment, bite into a saltine and let it sit on your tongue without chewing or swallowing. After a minute or so, you’ll start to notice a sweet taste. This is because your saliva contains an enzyme that whacks individual sugars off each end of the carb chains that make up the cracker. The More You Know!

Glucose, fructose, and galactose are all naturally occurring — mostly in grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds, and dairy products.

But added sugars are the ones that are added to foods or drinks during or after processing.

That would include the sugar that's added to things like cake, candy, ice cream, soda, and so on. It would also include the sugar you put in your oatmeal, tea, or coffee; the syrup you drizzle on your pancakes; and the chocolate syrup you occasionally squeeze from the bottle directly into your mouth.

While naturally occurring sugars have been part of the human diet for… well, forever, really, added sugars are a fairly recent development — especially in the huge quantities we have access to today.

Research suggests there's a connection between added sugars and obesity, and they’ve been linked to increasing rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, and even depression.

According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, added sugar should make up less than 10 percent of your daily calorie intake. The World Health Organization (WHO) has even more stringent recommendations, urging that it's best to limit added sugars to less than 5 percent of your daily calorie intake.

Luckily, food manufacturers now are required to disclose the added sugar content of foods on the nutrition label, which makes it a bit easier to identify sources of added sugar in your diet.

This is a GREAT thing, because there are more than 50 names for sugar that can show up on ingredient labels, making it really difficult to ID added sugar without the assist from the nutrition label.

Here are some of the most common sugars you’ll run across:

But that's not all, folks! There are more than 50 (no exaggeration) more words for sugar that you may find on ingredient labels. Here's a whole mess of ’em:

And remember, you don't have to completely remove added sugar from your diet. That would be pretty tough, actually. Just make it a point to minimize your added sugar intake. ’Cause you know what? You’re sweet enough already.