Sugar Has 60 Names. Here Are the Ones Worth Recognising

There is a trick used across the food industry that is entirely legal and almost invisible. Ingredients must be listed in order of weight. So if you use one sugar, it lands high on the list, where people can see it. If you use four different sugars, each one lands lower — and the product can honestly claim that flour, not sugar, is its main ingredient.

Learning to spot the aliases is the single most useful supermarket skill there is.

The names

• The -ose family: sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, galactose.
• The syrups: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, rice syrup, malt syrup, golden syrup, maple syrup, agave syrup, carob syrup.
• The "natural" ones: honey, molasses, treacle, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, date paste, coconut sugar, panela.
• The technical ones: maltodextrin, dextrin, invert sugar, caramel, barley malt, diastatic malt.

A word on the third group. Honey, agave, coconut sugar and date syrup are marketed as healthier alternatives. Metabolically they are sugar. They may contain trace minerals; the amounts are nutritionally irrelevant. Use them because you like the flavour, not because you believe they are doing you good.

Where the sugar actually hides

Not in the obvious places. Everyone knows a chocolate bar is sugar. The problem is the food you think is savoury or virtuous:

• Pasta sauce — routinely 6–12 g per serving.
• Flavoured yoghurt — a single pot can carry as much sugar as a dessert.
• Breakfast cereal and granola — granola is frequently the sweetest thing in the aisle.
• Bread — most commercial loaves contain added sugar.
• "Healthy" snack bars — date paste and syrup are the base of most of them.
• Ketchup, barbecue sauce, sweet chilli — largely sugar.
• Smoothies and juice — even the ones with no added sugar are a concentrated dose without the fibre that would have slowed it down.

The target

Most health authorities suggest keeping free sugars below around 10% of energy intake, and ideally below 5% — which is roughly 25–30 g a day for an adult. A single sugary drink can exceed that on its own.

Note that this refers to free or added sugars. The sugar in a whole apple or a plain yoghurt is not the target and never has been. Fruit is not the problem.

Cutting back without misery

1. Start with drinks. They are the biggest single source for most people and the easiest to change, because you barely notice a drink you didn't have.
2. Buy plain and sweeten yourself. Plain yoghurt with your own honey will still contain far less sugar than the flavoured tub.
3. Taper rather than quit. Sweetness preference genuinely adapts over a few weeks; go too fast and everything tastes like cardboard and you give up.
4. Do not replace sugar with a mountain of sweeteners. They are safe in normal amounts, but they keep the preference for intense sweetness alive, which is the thing you were trying to change.