Sugar, sugar --- everywhere sugar!!

As a dietitian, I've actually never been one to pay much attention to food labels. Sounds crazy, but basically I already know what's in most foods. It's kind of a fun game in our house... Marc will ask me - how many calories, or how much protein is in an egg or slice of cheese and I can rattle it off like clockwork. However this new "low-carb" diet that we are now following has renewed my interest in reading labels, mainly carb content. And wouldn't you know it, I was wrong! I thought for sure my "natural chicken sausage" would be pristine and have 0 carbs. But I guess I'm out of the loop lately as wouldn't you know it, corn syrup was the 3rd ingredient in my sausage. Since when are they adding sugar to sausage? I need to investigate...

What I found is an absolute gluttony of sugar in our foods today. Every processed food item out there is laden with sugar. And I find it quite ingenious how manufacturers avoid listing sugar as the FIRST ingredient on their food labels. Here's the secret: if they add a variety of sugars, namely corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, invert sugar, brown sugar, molasses, honey, cane syrup etc, they can break up the types of sugar ingredients to avoid having just one as the main ingredient. Try it out - look at your favorite cereal, bread, or the image below. You may notice "whole grain blah-blah-blah" as the first ingredient and then eight types of sugar to follow. If they just used one type of sugar - well it would be the first thing listed.

Even the popular food chain restaurants like Applebee's, Chili's, Red Lobster etc. are finding that people's tastes are prone to sugar. Therefore they are adding more and more sugar to their sauces, entrees, and sides. You can't even avoid it going out for what you think is a "chef-prepared" meal. Sugar tastes good and it sells.

The original eye-opener for me in the 'sugar crisis' was actually very early in my dietetics career. Back in 1996, I started out as a kitchen manager/dietitian for the Kenosha County School District in Wisconsin. I was hired to re-vamp the school breakfast and lunch menus to comply with new government standards and oversee meal production. The federal government officials, with all their wisdom, had imposed a new regulation on school lunches - 30% or less calories from fat. Sounds great in theory - nobody wants our kids consuming so much fat.

Well, in practice, it's not so straight forward. In manipulating the menus, I quickly discovered that the only way to adjust meals to meet the new standards was to add canned fruits in heavy syrup and/or sugary jello to every meal. The only way to follow guidelines and stick within our food budget was to add more sugar to the menu. The carbs offset the fat calories and low and behold we had menus that fit the new guidelines! Does that sound like a healthy fix? Absolutely not, I was totally disheartened by this. As a fresh out of college, bound to save the world, dietitian, this was the first of many " sigh" moments for me.