The "Stop Light" Carbohydrate: Added Sugars

Sugar  is the simplest carbohydrate we have and the biggest boost to our blood glucose levels we can get from food. Need a quick zap of energy: most of us choose a sugary carb-rich food. Some times we don't even know we are doing it!

Many carbohydrate foods have some kind of sugar in them.Even milk! We may think of milk as a protein food - actually it belongs to the dairy food group - but if you read the label on a carton of any kind of cow's milk, you will see each serving has about  12 grams of carbohydrate, and nearly all of those are labelled as sugars in the form of lactose ( simply put, lactose is milk sugar)

You can view the carbohydrate content of each type of cow's milk by re-visiting the blogpost about the 1% or less campaign.

Of course lactose occurs naturally in milk, just as fructose occurs naturally in fruit. The fructose in fruit is why we call fruit a simple carbohydrate...the sugar in most fruit is released to our blood streams quickly.

But what happens when berries or apples are processed into juice or jelly?  If you look at food labels you may find that their natural sweeteners are enhanced by added sugar in the form of sucrose, maltose, honey, corn syrup or - worse yet - high fructose corn syrup.

The same thing happens to many, if not most processed foods: including breads of all kinds, cereals, canned and frozen fruits and vegetables, juices and "juice drinks", sauces and spreads like ketchup, salsa and peanut butter, frozen "meals," and yogurt. Most of us can handle the naturally occurring sugars in our carbohydrate foods, but the added sugars have made a big contribution to our nation's weight problem. I am astonished that sugar is sometimes added to foods that are already sweet - or that don't seem to need more sugar at all!

Added sugar provides lots of calories in very little food and virtually all of those calories are empty. That's why the refined sugar carbs earn a "Red Light'!