Low Carb - Watching for Hidden Sugars
Powered by Max Banner Ads
Are you aware of the hidden sugar in many of the foods that you eat? Many foods have sugar, in one form or another, that is added during the processing of the food. Even if the food says that it is zero carbs, there may be sugars in the food that raises the carb level but doesn’t have to be reported as carbs.
No longer is carb counting enough if you are on the South Beach Diet. You should look on the food labels before consuming processed foods to make sure that there are no hidden carbs.
Also called simple carbohydrates, sugars are an ingredient present in many natural food. Food manufacturers will add sugars to many processed foods, mostly because of the taste of the public. People like their foods sweet.
Look carefully at your food labels. Sometimes food manufacturers will has a small amount of many different kind of sugars. They do this because the sugars won’t show up as being one of the main ingredients. Ingredient lists on food labels, start with the ingredient that has the highest quantity in the food. Each successive ingredient is listed according to how much of that ingredient is present in the food.
Don’t forget to look out for the healthy ingredients that contain sugar that will mess up your South Beach Diet phase work. Healthy sugars are honey and rice syrup. You will also find organic dehydrated cane juice as an ingredient on some food labels. This is also sugar.
Fruit juices should really be stayed away from if you are watching your carbs. I know that it is tempting to have a cup of juice in the morning but this will work against you for the rest of the carb counting day. The processed juices are even worse then some fresh squeezed juice. Juice concentrates are the worst of the worst. They really should be called sugar concentrates. The first thing the processors use is some of the least nutritious juices that are available. These are usually apple juice (sorry, but the juice doesn’t have the much nutrition), pear or white grape juice. Then they reduce these juices so that basically the only thing that is left is a sugar juice.
This is another reason to stay away from the canned fruits. They are usually soaking in carb filled juices as they sit on the shelves.
Look for the code words that manufacturers are using on food labels to find out what sugars are being added to your foods. You can be sure that sugar is present if you see the words syrup or sweetener. You can also take it for granted that any word ending in ‘ose’ is a manufacturered sugar that you want to stay away from.
We spend all of this time trying to cut out carbs and eat healthy. Don’t sabotage your diet strategy by accidentally ingesting hidden sugars.
Related posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment