02/09/2026
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY NAMES OF SUGAR?
If we want to really read and understand labels so we can avoid sugar, we need to know all the tricks of the trade and how sugar hides from us.
Food manufacturers are getting savvy, knowing if sugar is high on their ingredient list, their product isnāt exactly going to fly off the shelf.
So what do they do?
Firstly they disguise sugar under all these different names knowing people donāt associate many of these with just plain old sugar.
Secondly, they use multiple versions of sugar. Ingredients are listed in order of the quantity present in that product. If a product has more sugar than anything else, sugar will be the first ingredient on the list. Now food manufacturers know that if sugar is no.1 on the list, people probably wonāt buy it. They want sugar to be as far down the list as possible so they use multiple types of sugar and suddenly each type of sugar is individually smaller and will now appear further down the ingredient list, giving you the impression sugar is no longer the number 1 ingredient.
So watch out for all the names of sugar, and add them up. Look at the nutrition label for total sugar per serving as well as the ingredient list.
And donāt be fooled by āno added sugarsā (may still be high with naturally occurring sugars) or ārefined sugar freeā (generally means itās packed with coconut sugar, dried fruit or some other sugar).
Sugar is sugar no matter what you call it!
What other names of sugar have you discovered? These arenāt all of them.
