Understanding Hidden Sugars in Food Labels

In our previous blogs, we have talked a lot about the harms caused by sugar, how companies deceive consumers and the alternatives to sugar. In this piece, we’ll talk more about how you can read food labels & spot hidden sugars. The aim is to give you & your kids an idea about how one can go about this. Because whether we like it or not, food label analysis has become a much-needed skill today. One that might not pay you but still nonetheless something you’d be better off with.

First & most important rule: Ignore what the brand markets.
High this. Low that. Helps with this. Rich in that. They use words like these to make the claim but absolve themselves of any & every responsibility. These words mean nothing to us, let’s keep that in mind. Credit lene sab a jate hai lekin kaam ki ownership lene koi nahi.

Also, look past the pictures to see what’s inside – what they are made of. No, really. The food could look like the love of your life but be made chock full of toxicity. There is a reason brands write “for visual representation” or something like that in a corner of said enticing visual. The real product may differ they say. Why? Why must it differ? Show what you actually make or provide a heck of a good reason for the change.

Blindly trusting brands to regard our health in good faith has left us where we are. It is now time to verify before trusting, atleast in the case of what a brand claims to be & what it really is.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Next time you are buying snacks, turn them over and go through the ingredients and the food label. Chances are you’ll find high amounts of processed sugar in them. And even if you don’t find sugar, you’ll find something from the table below.

 

Now, we don’t ask you to remember this table. And let’s say you do put in the effort of memorizing it, companies could just come out with some other alternative not mentioned here.

Toh phir kya kare hum? Give up?

No, that’s not what we mean. There are a few things we can do. We’ll try to list down some rules of thumb you can follow. And just being careful & curious about the food you eat in general would go a long way.

Now take a look at the cutouts of the behind of a biscuit brand below.

 

Ingredients of one of the most popular biscuit brands

Point number 1:

The ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity. Chilling isn’t it? That maida, sugar and the like occupy the top places.

 

 

Point number 2: 

Check the percentages of each ingredient if given. Unfortunately, FSSAI hasn’t made it mandatory for companies to list the percent composition of the ingredients but sugar being 33% tells you what to expect from the biscuit.

 

 

Point number 3: 

Starting with maida and ending with salt, there are a whopping 10 ingredients/ food groups.

 

 

Sidenote: Vegetables could be a food group, masalas could be a food group. You get the drift.

 

Usually, foods shouldn’t have more than 5 to 7 ingredients/ food groups. Now 10 might not sound like a lot but look at the number of colours, the flavouring substances, emulsifiers and other things used, and you’ll start feeling annoyed. And what do these numbers in the names of the ingredients even mean? Usually, anything with numbers is a colouring, flavouring, emulsifying, stabilising, preserving or some or other agent.

Good food doesn’t need these. When you eat an orange, you eat an orange. Not something that looks, tastes or smells like an orange but is not orange. Companies dupe us in the name of natural ingredients & flavours all the time.

 

Point number 4: 

Anything ending with “ol” like maltitol, “ose” like lactose is a sugar. Avoid foods with these items. Also avoid the likes of high fructose corn syrup (HCFC) and maltodextrin.

 

 

Food label of one of the most popular biscuit brands

Moving on from the ingredient list, let’s take a look at the nutritional composition.

Point number 1: 

See the composition above? It’s for 100 grams. Have you seen anyone eat biscuits like that? Most things we eat, we don’t weigh like this. And companies get away by hiding information in them. That’s why always try to :calculate per piece nutrition of what you eat, in our example here it’s a biscuit. I wish FSSAI mandated it for the brands but here we are.

 

 

Point number 2: 

How much does each nutrient make up of the total. The total nutrition is a pizza pie, and we are trying to see which nutrient has the biggest slice of the pie. We have to do a nutritional breakdown to see what we are getting into, or rather, what’s getting into us. This will tell us if the claims the company was making about being “low calorie” or “low sugar” are actually true or not. We are all aware of how misleading these claims are.

 

 

 

Point number 3: 

What is the total amount of sugar? And what is the amount of added sugar? Now this can also be bypassed if the company uses artificial sweeteners which are 0 calories but these sweeteners have their own issues and should only be used if there is proper research done on them.

 

 

I have calculated the following information from the nutritional information table above. Check and tell if it’s right. 

 

Nutrients	Approx. values per 100 gram	Value per buscuit (10 g = approx. 1 biscuit)	Approx. values per pack (15 biscuits in a pack)	Percent composition per pack	No. of calories
Protein	5 g	0.5 g	7.5 g	2.92%	30
Carbohydrate	72.7 g	7.27 g	109.05 g	42.42%	436.2
of which Total Sugars	38.3 g	3.83 g	57.45 g	22.35%	222
Added Sugars	35.1 g	3.51 g	52.65 g	20.48%	204
Total fat	20.3 g	2.03 g	30.45 g	11.84%	182.7

 

 

But do you see this? If I have calculated right, 20% or 52.65 grams of sugar is in that pack of biscuits. Let’s say you don’t eat the whole pack and only eat 5. That’s still 17.55 grams of processed sugar.

WHO recommends around 25 to 35 grams pf sugar per day.

Let’s try the above exercise with a popular beverage. 

Here’s the ingredient & nutritional information label.

 

Yeah, the exercise won’t paint a pretty picture. But if you want to see a compilation of such labels. Here they are. This will give you a pretty good idea of hidden sugars in food. These can also help you practice your food label analysis skill. Especially don’t forget the added sugar food label. 

Understanding food labels, especially Indian food labels is not easy but you have done difficult things before and you’ll be able to easily do this. Sach bata rahe hai, this doesn’t compare to what you have gone through. We wish you wouldn’t have to go through this but the state of the food industry is such that we have to do this. 

Use all the resources at your disposal to figure out what’s best for you.

FAQs

1. How can I understand food labels to identify hidden sugars?
   Go through our blog above and you’ll get a direction for the same.
2. What is the difference between "sugar-free" and "no added sugar" on food labels?
   Sugar free means there is no sugar in the product while no added sugar means, there was none added during the process but if it was already there from before, they (the company) don’t know about that. These are ways to shirk responsibility.
   
3. How do food labels in India differ from those in other countries?
   This is an entire different blog in & of itself but you can check it out here.
   
4. Why is it important to monitor sugar intake in children's diets?
   To much sugar could lead to a variety of problems starting from dental to diabetes and then worse diseases from there on.
5. Are there hidden sugars in dairy products marketed for children?
   Yes, thus it is necessary to dissect the food label for the same.