🍭 75+ Names for Sugar: How Sugar Disguises Itself on Ingredient Labels

Food manufacturers use confusing marketing terms to hide the true amount of sugar in their foods, and this is something you need to be aware of. You may ask yourself, why are the food manufacturers load their products with so much sugar. The answer is simple: Taste and palatability.

When the food manufacturers removed all naturally occurring good fats from their products, they had to replace them with sugar so that they are palatable and sell-able to consumers. It is that simple!

Same sugar, different names

Meanwhile, you may have noticed that many food ingredients ending in "-ose" are sugars. These scientific sounding names often appear on ingredient labels and complicate it for the consumer to recognize just how many different forms of sugar may be present in a particular processed food product.

In a nutshell...

Glucose is the body's primary fuel source and the simplest sugar used by the body's cells for energy.

Fructose is the naturally occurring sugar found in fruit. It tastes sweeter than glucose and is commonly used in processed foods and sweetened beverages.

Sucrose is ordinary table sugar. It consists of equal parts glucose and fructose and derives much of its sweetness from its fructose content.

Dextrose is chemically identical to glucose and is commonly used as a sweetener in processed foods.

Maltose, also known as malt sugar, consists of two glucose molecules joined together. It is found in foods containing barley and malt.

Lactose, often called milk sugar, consists of glucose and galactose. It occurs naturally in milk and dairy products.

Galactose has the same chemical formula as glucose but a slightly different molecular structure. It is found primarily in dairy foods and is released when lactose is broken down during digestion.

This list contains common examples, but there are many more. If you do not recognize these names on ingredient labels, you may be consuming far more sugar than you realize.

Sugar does not always appear as "sugar" on ingredient labels. It may be listed under different names within the same ingredient list. Being aware of this is important when making food choices at the grocery store. As a general rule, the safest approach is to stay away from industrially produced foods with long ingredient lists filled with unfamiliar and difficult-to-pronounce ingredients.

If you are interested in knowing more about sugar, please check out the articles we published on this topic.

• What Is a Carbohydrate?

• Glucose: The Body's Preferred Fuel

• Fructose: The Sugar That Behaves Differently

• High Fructose Corn Syrup Explained

• Lactose: The Sugar Found in Milk

• Comparing Common Sweeteners