by Cynserity Stevens

Created on: March 25, 2009   Last Updated: March 27, 2009

There is sugar in the most unlikely of places. It is lurking in the milk you pour on your cereal, in the bread and lunch meat on your sandwich, and in the spaghetti, sauce, and meatballs, on your dinner plate.

People are unaware of the levels of sugar they consume in a day. A little breath mint could have six grams of sugar in it and sometimes people pop those two and three at a time. Ever wonder what those delicious jelly beans, that you shovel by the handful into your mouth, are made of? Sugar, some flavoring, some high fructose corn syrup (which is nothing but sugar) and hardly anything else.

Even if you check your food labels you could still be consuming large quantities of sugar. Just because the amount is zero grams on the nutritional data label in the sugar category, that does NOT mean there isn't some other type of sugar disguised in that same product.

Surprisingly one does not have to be a scientist to uncover the hidden sugars in their favorite foods. Here is a common list of sugars best known aliases and their definitions.sucrose - A crystalline disaccharide of fructose and glucose, C12H22O11, found in many plants but extracted as ordinary sugar mainly from sugar cane and sugar beets, widely used as a sweetener or preservative and in the manufacture of plastics and soaps. Also called saccharosefructose - A very sweet sugar, C6H12O6, occurring in many fruits and honey and used as a preservative for foodstuffs and as an intravenous nutrient. Also called fruit sugar, levulose.glucose - A colorless to yellowish syrupy mixture of dextrose, maltose, and dextrins containing about 20 percent water, used in confectionery, alcoholic fermentation, tanning, and treating tobacco. Also called starch syrup.dextrose - An isomer of glucose that is found in honey and sweet fruits galactose - A sugar contained in milk. Galactose makes up half of the sugar called lactose that is found in milk. lactose - A disaccharide, C12H22O11, found in milk, that may be hydrolyzed to yield glucose and galactose.corn syrup - A syrup prepared from cornstarch, used in industry and in numerous food products as a sweetener.high-fructose corn syrup - Any of a group of corn syrups that has undergone enzymatic processing to increase its fructose content, and then been mixed with pure corn syrup. HFCS is ubiquitous in processed foods and beverages, including soft drinks, yogurt, cookies, salad dressing and tomato soup.honey - A sweet yellow liquid produced by bees maple syrup - Made by concentrating sap from sugar maples molasses - A thick dark syrup produced by boiling down juice from sugar cane And of coarse any ingredient that contains the word, sugar. i.e. brown sugar, raw sugar, confectioners sugar, etc.

Now that you know all of the commonly used names for sugar in the industry you will be better able to identify them on the food labels of your favorite foods, thus reducing the amount of sugar you consume in your diet.

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