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Sugar Is Back on Food Labels, This Time as a Selling Point
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by Barbara Mathieson | March 21, 2009 at 04:40 am
246 views | 38 Recommendations | 8 comments
By KIM SEVERSON Published: March 20, 2009Sugar, the nutritional pariah that dentists and dietitians have long reviled, is enjoying a second act, dressed up as a natural, healthful ingredient.
From the tomato sauce on a Pizza Hut pie called “The Natural,” to the just-released soda Pepsi Natural, some of the biggest players in the American food business have started, in the last few months, replacing high-fructose corn syrup with old-fashioned sugar.
ConAgra uses only sugar or honey in its new Healthy Choice All Natural frozen entrees. Kraft Foods recently removed the corn sweetener from its salad dressings, and is working on its Lunchables line of portable meals and snacks.
The turnaround comes after three decades during which high-fructose corn syrup had been gaining on sugar in the American diet. Consumption of the two finally drew even in 2003, according to the Department of Agriculture. Recently, though, the trend has reversed. Per capita, American adults ate about 44 pounds of sugar in 2007, compared with about 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
We still must control the amount of sugar in our diets, but removing high fructose corn syrup is a good start. I started avoiding high fructose corn syrup years ago. I have lost weight and no longer take blood pressure medication.
If you think that you do not eat high fructose corn syrup, go read the labels of any processed food in your pantry.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (8)
at 04:50 on March 21st, 2009
Hopefully common sense will prevail. Most of the corn is Genetically Modified, too.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
at 04:50 on March 21st, 2009
What ever happened to the natural sweetener, Stevia?
at 09:32 on March 21st, 2009
It's been used in Japanese Coke for a while, and I believe they're using it here now as well, either Coke or Pepsi.
at 07:18 on March 21st, 2009
I actually prefer to just eat the real version of things like sugar and butter, I think it's better for your body overall.
at 08:10 on March 21st, 2009
Sucrose is a glucose and a fructose. Check it out. That is what I learned in biochem.
I have heard that fructose raises triglyceride levels faster than glucose does, but what I don't get is how sucrose does less of this than high-fructose corn syrup.
I mean sucrose is 50% fructose. Fructose once-great claim to its superiority was that it needed less insulin to enter our cells.
This link has some good explanations: The Double Danger of High Fructose Corn Syrup
"In 1980 the average person ate 39 pounds of fructose and 84 pounds of sucrose. In 1994 the average person ate 66 pounds of sucrose and 83 pounds of fructose, providing 19 percent of total caloric energy.3 Today approximately 25 percent of our average caloric intake comes from sugars, with the larger fraction as fructose.4"
at 08:12 on March 21st, 2009
Moderation is the key word here.
Sugar is healthy and needed in moderation just as salt, copper, and many other things...
at 09:47 on March 21st, 2009
High Fructose corn syrup is really bad news, the process to make it is incredibly complex. It's too bad real whole sugar is so expensive. I'm pretty sure the only genuine whole sugar is Rapadura made by Rapunzel. It's like 5 bucks for a pound and a half. Sucanat is supposedly whole sugar but I'm not sure. Rapadura contains a good amount of minerals etc, it's too bad sugar has to be sold stripped of everything, I bet diabetes could be cut way down if whole sugar became the norm.
at 21:08 on March 21st, 2009
Well, all I can say is I hope Vernor's Ginger Ale switches back to sugar too, because the corn syrup version sure doesn't taste like it use to when I was a kid.