Watch Out For the Hidden Sugar Content in Your Packaged Food

Reviewed by: | Author: Manoja Kalakanti

You step on your weighing scales every day, and cannot help groaning out loudly. Why? Because you are trying everything in the book yet you don’t seem to drop a single pound. You have joined your local gym, eating right, and even stopped staying up late to watch your favorite TV show and ignored the constant beeping of your smartphone, to make sure you are snoozing right as well. Then what seems to be wrong? Guessing it’s your sugar intake? Well, you’re right in that case. Sugar is the main culprit behind stagnating your weight loss journey and this article helps you to find the hidden sugar content from your daily diet.

Watch Out For the Hidden Sugar Content in Your Packaged Food

Abs are made in Kitchen:

Yes, you have heard the saying right. Your fitness is seventy percent dependent on the diet and thirty percent dependent on exercises. So that coerces us to give another dekko to our diet plan. What seems to be wrong? You are having cornflakes in the morning and seem to be pretty kicked about the fact that you have started the day and started it on a healthy note.

Abs are made in Kitchen

But have you really checked the label of the food packet which you tossed it out without giving it a thought? Your food packet can reveal tonnes of things which you are putting into your mouth. Not to forget that the low fat cookie you had in the evening contained a huge amount of sugar to make up for the diminishing amount of fat content in your so-called “healthy” food stuff.

More Sugar in your Bread:

Yes, even in harmless foodstuff like bread you are having more sugar than the requisite amount. Even in food like peanut butter, there is a huge amount of sugar hiding behind a façade of healthy food. Yes, you don’t add sugar to your beverage and you take healthy beverages like green tea to melt the fat which seems to sit pretty on your waist. But have you eliminated bread or biscuits from your diet? That’s what stumps you right? All along you went about thinking that bread was supposed to be healthy.

More Sugar contents in your Bread

Okay, you even switched to the brown bread version, that’s whole wheat shouldn’t be bad? But chances are the so-called brown version of your bread has some really high sugar content also. That bamboozles you right? so let’s find out what are the packaged foods should you put under the scanner and think twice before putting it right into your mouth.

Drinking food juice:

Downing gallons of fruit juice makes you think that it’s the healthy stuff you are consuming fruit sugar content in the juice is alarmingly high. Yes, more than the required amount that would be deemed healthy for you. While eating a whole fruit it would contain the required amount of fibre and you would chew the fruit filling your stomach and satiating but same does not hold true for the juices, which has a nominal amount of fruit pulp and the rest of the drink is spiked with a lot of sugar and water.

More additives are added to the drink impersonating as the fruit content. So why should you consume such a huge amount of sugar when you know that it can play havoc with your blood sugar levels? What’s more, you are losing the all-important fibre content of the fruits as well.

Drinking food juices

Not to mention the vitamins and minerals which get washed away with so much of processing. So if you are avoiding the sugar content of foods and abhorring fizzy colas. You must know this for sure that the fruit juice you are so unabashedly consuming is sometimes worse than your cold drinks. That means you should read the labels twice and look for other things which mask the sugar content and masquerade as the healthier stuff like corn syrup.

So before you toss that fruit juice into the basket in the supermarket, stop and read the labels. Chances are that you might not buy that juice again, if you are really worried about the sugar content in foods, that is.

Not reading the labels:

Are you guilty of that crime, not reading labels? Yes, it can be regarded as a crime because you are unknowingly influx your body with a lot of sugar, which is harmful to the body as it increases your risk for diabetes hypertension and other lifestyle diseases. You not only have to read the label but have to read between the lines as well. Now how would you do that?

Not reading the labels on packaged foods

When you read wholewheat or that the food contains omega3 you are kicked about the idea that it contains those healthy ingredients that constitute a healthy diet. But have you given it a thought that it only contains a tiny amount of that and the rest is loaded with all kinds of unhealthy stuff? Hidden sugar refined wheat and a lot of additives which may be summed up as unhealthy and at its worst.

Eating whole wheat:

As we have discussed before that whole wheat is considered healthy but the kind of whole wheat that we consume in our packaged food are pulverised into very fine flour which is as good or as worse refined flour. We seldom get the unprocessed flour that is good for our health, like millets. There’s a rise of celiac disease today and it is largely due to gluten sensitivity.

Eating the whole wheat

Gluten is a kind of protein and consuming large amounts of gluten can give rise to many diseases like irritable bowel syndrome, pain, fatigue etc. So nutritionists today are suggesting to have a gluten free diet which would not only be beneficial to your health but would help you to shed the unwanted fat with ease.

Yoghurt:

Yogurt is largely considered healthy but the yoghurt we buy from the store contains huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup which not only adds to the hidden sources of sugar, but also lots of other preservatives which is detrimental to your health, and gives rise to central obesity. If it is low on sugar it must be containing artificial sweeteners which are a worse offender.

Yoghurt

Ketchup:

We seldom bother about the sugar content of ketchup. As we are more bothered about the packaged food sugar content. Well, ketchup should also feature as a food which you should avoid. As even the most popular ketchup contain high levels of corn syrup. So avoid it like the plague. The next time you reach out for your french fries forgets, the ketchup as it is going to make it unhealthier still.

most popular ketchup

Cereals:

There are a plethora of all kinds of cereals available in the market like muesli, cornflakes, rice crispies and so on. Why do you think it tastes divine without having to add the extra sugar. Because it contains a huge amount of sugar, yes the food sugar content is unquestionably very high and you have to think twice before you reach out for your trusted cereals.

trusted cereals

Salad Dressings like Mayonnaise:

You think you are doing it right by having salads. But you cannot do without your salad dressings. That’s adding to its unhealthy quotient hugely. Look out for maltodextrin and modified food starch in the food labels and rest assured you would be shocked at the hidden sugar content in your seemingly harmless salad dressings like mayonnaise.

harmless Salad-Dressings-like-Mayonnaise

Packaged Chips:

When we are consuming food that is not very sweet we don’t bother to watch out for the sugar content in the foods.Especially in foods like packaged chips and fried foods. The added MSG in the food is another culprit which does umpteen worse things to your body. So don’t bother to swap other food stuff to avoid sugar content of foods. The non-sugary things might contain an overload of sugar as well.

Packaged Food Chips

Packaged Diet Snacks:

Many of these snack packs contain a specific number of calories like to say about 100 calories and many people who are perennially on a diet swear by these packaged diet snacks. But do you know in order to compensate for calories they are adding astronomically high amounts of unhealthy additives like artificial sweeteners and other things which are not even mentioned on the food packet? That makes it all the scarier as you don’t even know what you are eating.

Packaged Diet Snacks

Tomato Soup:

Soups, in general, are considered healthy but packaged ones are not. Yes, the ubiquitous tomato soup you see on the supermarket shelves which scream healthy and nutritious in bold letters. But the additives and the hidden sugar in food is casually underplayed and you seem to be fooled by the so-called healthy stuff which is there in the foods. As manufacturers have this marketing gimmick up their sleeves to tone down the unhealthy stuff on the labels and play up the little amount of healthy stuff that is there in the food.

ubiquitous tomato soup

Like if there is 2% of herbs they are going to highlight that bit and make it look like 200%. So as a consumer be aware of the food labels as it concerns your health and you ought not to take things lying down.

Dried fruit:

So should you swap your fresh fruit with dried fruits as you hear multitudinous good things about dried fruit. The date sugar content is also very high. So instead of going on a date eating spree because it contains high amounts of nutrients stop yourself to just one or two and don’t binge on it. But if you have to choose between candies and dried fruits, dried fruits still win hands down but if you have to choose between whole fruits and dried fruits you would be wiser f you choose whole fruit.

Dried fruits

Granola Bars:

Granola bars are considered healthier than your favourite chocolate bars. But are they really? if their sugar content in the food list is so high. The hidden sugar content in those delicious bars is raised with the addition of fructose and corn syrup or cane sugar. Look out for natural sweeteners if you have to have on to satiate your sweet teeth like fruit and honey.

Healthy Granola Bars

Milk Alternatives:

Soy milk and almond milk are finding new consumers every day especially those people who are lactose intolerant. But some of these healthy drinks are laden with sugar sometimes more than their healthier counterpart cow milk. Also more than their protein content. So it is advisable to look for those which are bereft of high doses of sugar content.

Soy milk and almond milk

Green Juice:

The harmless seeming green juice which is as the labels say chock-a-block with vitamins and minerals are also full of sugar sometimes they contain as much as 50 gms of sugar that’s way more than what you should be having in a day and that too in the garb of health food. If you have a vegetable and chew it to get its nutritional wholesomeness your brain will register that you have eaten something substantial. So it’s much wiser to eat a crunchy salad than chug away a lot of liquid calories.

Green Juices

Instant flavoured Oatmeal:

Your breakfast consists of the healthy oatmeal and you top it with strawberries and blueberries. Healthy right? Even if the strawberries sugar content is pretty high still they are rich in anti-oxidants and good for health. But the flavoured oatmeal does contain high amounts of sugar. In order to have something as healthy as oatmeal, you are having hidden sugar ingredients.

Instant flavoured Oatmeal

Wine:

Doctors are recommending to have a glass of wine every day to keep your heart superhealthy. But do really stop at a glass or you are one of those who can’t stop oneself from downing three or four glasses of your favourite beverage. The sugar content of wine is pretty high and stop yourself from chugging away.

superhealthy wine

There are a lot of hidden sugar content in the prettily packaged and beckoning you to buy them. Yes once you are in a supermarket you are lured towards the beautifully packaged foodstuff which you would not buy because you need them but because you get tempted by them. Don’t get fooled by their labels sometimes they hide more than they reveal. As they say instead of buying packaged diet food buy the whole food stuff and cook up a storm in your kitchen. You would not feel content about your cooking skills but also content to have the healthy dose of vitamins mineral carbohydrate fat and natural sugar as a super healthy concoction. Your body would certainly thank you later.

How to Find out Hidden Sugar Content in Food Packaging – PDF

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