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ice cream in front of the TV every night because as a little kid, you did the very same thing with your dad, and that was your time together. Habit ties into the emotional attraction, too. If you’re used to having a muffin for breakfast, cookies in the afternoon, or dessert after dinner, something feels off if you skip it.
NOW YOU SEE THEM, NOW YOU DON’T
    We all know that regular soda is liquid sugar. For a while, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about the controversial “Big Gulp ban” in New York City. But you rarely hear that kind of passion over a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, which can have 2 teaspoons of added sugar per slice, or a bowl of raisin bran, which contains 4½ teaspoons—some of it from the raisins, but most of it added. (As I’ll explain later, you should be consuming only 6 to 9 teaspoons of added sugar per day.) It’s one thing to know you’re eating a sugar bomb. It’s quite another to learn that many foods you consider healthy or don’t even think of as sweet can be sugar bombs, too.
    There are two main types of added sugars in foods: the kind you know about and the kind you don’t.
    Straight-Up Sugar. Found in candy, sweetened soft drinks (sodas, juice drinks, flavored milks, coffee drinks), sweetened breakfast cereals, energy andcereal bars, and desserts, this type of sugar is right out there, loud and proud. While it’s often listed as “sugar” on a food’s ingredient label, it might also be called by any number of different names (see this page ).
    Even if you’re aware that these foods pack sugar, you may not realize just how much. For instance, doesn’t raspberry iced tea sound a lot better than Coke? A 16-ounce Coke has 52 grams, or 13 teaspoons, of sugar. A 16-ouncebottle of Snapple Raspberry Tea has 36 grams of sugar, or 9 teaspoons—better, but not by much.
    Secret Sugar. Wander down any center aisle of your supermarket. Pick up bottles, jars, and boxes at random. More often than not, you’re likely to find sugar listed as an ingredient, even if you don’t recognize its alias.
    True to their name, however, Secret Sugars lurk in foods you don’t even think of as sweet. These include pasta sauce, frozen entrées (low calorie or otherwise), packages of ramen noodle soup (the sugar is in the packet of broth, which tastes salty!), salad dressings, ketchup, barbecue sauce, and some deli meats and breakfast sausages. There are also sweeteners that you may not realize are sugar. For example, despite its Garden of Eden name, agave nectar contains more fructose than table sugar. And a popular brand of yogurt came under legal fire in 2012 for its simultaneous use of evaporated cane juice and claim of “no sugar added.” It’s frustrating, but once you’re familiar with the many words for sugar that appear in a product’s ingredients list, you’ll be better prepared to control your sugar choices.
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Yeah, That’s Sugar
    Unfortunately, food manufacturers are not required to distinguish between natural and added sugars on a food label. All you’ll see is a gram amount for sugars. That can make determining your intake of added sugar tricky. For instance, you could pick up a 6-ounce cup of plain low-fat yogurt, look at the Nutrition Facts label, and see that it has 12 grams of sugar. You might think that sounds like a lot, but that’s not
added
sugar—it’s the sugar naturally present in dairy products. Look at the ingredients list and you won’t see any form of added sugar listed, so you know it’s free of added sugar.
    But what about fruit yogurt? Fruit has natural sugar, and the yogurt has natural sugar. Does that mean that the 26 grams of sugar listed on the label for a 6-ounce container of low-fat blueberry yogurt is natural sugar? Check the list.
    Added sugar goes by many names. Anything that ends in
–ose
is sugar, and so is anything with
sugar
or
syrup
after the name. If you see any of the words in the list on a food’s ingredients label,