What foods contain hidden sugar? When do you eat sweets and don't even know it? Be careful: these products can greatly exceed the allowable dose of sugar per day.
Low fat milk
Half a liter of skimmed milk is the daily dose of sugar / istockphoto.com
Many people find low-fat dairy products to be very healthy because they are a source of "pure" calcium without the extra calories. However, the same skimmed milk itself is just an aqueous solution with some meager content of proteins and carbohydrates. It is tasteless, and is unlikely to "go in" even to the most ardent fans of a healthy lifestyle. Therefore, sugar is added to low-fat milk and milk. It makes the product tastier, and masks the lack of saturation, which "left" along with the fats.
Take a carton of regular milk with 2.5% fat and look at the composition. You will be surprised, but you will find sugar there - 4.7 g per 100 g of product. It turns out that if you drank half a liter of milk a day, you have already consumed a daily dose of sugar. In sweet dairy products (such as yogurt and cottage cheese), sugar is expected to be higher. Sometimes its content can reach up to 10% of the total volume of the product.
Prepared sauces and salad dressings
A tablespoon of ketchup hides a teaspoon of sugar / istockphoto.com
Trying to abandon harmful mayonnaise, we often switch to sauces and salad dressings. And the last thing we expect to find in ketchup, in soy sauce or in tartar is sugar. Meanwhile, it is there, and often in very large quantities. Manufacturers usually don't list the exact sugar content, but there's a simple life hack: the higher an ingredient is on the ingredient list, the more it's in the product.
For example, in children's ketchup, sugar is in third place in the list of ingredients after tomatoes and water. In cheap soy sauce from the supermarket - in third place after water and salt. Take your favorite sauce and study the composition: this way you will at least approximately understand how much sugar is in it. Nutritionists say that ordinary pasteurized ketchup contains at least a teaspoon of sugar per tablespoon of the product. So use sauces and dressings very sparingly.
Sushi and rolls
Sugar binds rice for making sushi / istockphoto.com
Another surprise for healthy lifestyle adherents is the high sugar content in sushi and rolls. And the point here is not soy sauce at all (although it certainly also plays the role of a “sweet saboteur”). When cooking rice for sushi, it is necessary to add a sauce based on vinegar, salt and sugar - this allows you to achieve viscosity so that the rice does not crumble during cooking. On average, a recipe for 250 g of rice uses 20 g of sugar. Agree, this is quite a lot for a "dietary" dish.
Canned vegetables
Marinade for cucumbers is impossible without the addition of sugar / istockphoto.com
It is clear that there will be a lot of sugar in canned fruits - especially if they are pineapples, peaches or cherries in syrup. However, believe me that there is also a lot of it in canned vegetables. Sugar is a must-have in marinades for popular foods such as canned green peas, beans, corn, pickled mushrooms, tomatoes, and cucumbers.
Bread
Sugar is contained even in healthy black bread / istockphoto.com
Nutritionists branded white bread for a long time: it does not contain any useful substances, there are no vitamins and dietary fiber. All that is contained in a loaf of wheat is starch, gluten, salt, soda, yeast and, of course, sugar. We will not open America to you if we say that it is better to replace white bread with whole grain, rye, or at least wheat-rye. But teach that even such types of bread should not be abused. Sugar is taken in during the baking process anyway: for example, “dietary” black bread contains 4 g of sugar per 100 g of product.
Meat and sausage products
Sugar is added to the sausage to enhance the taste / istockphoto.com
Ham, bacon, carbonade, sausages, sausages and sausages - absolutely any of the meat and sausage delicacies contains sugar in its composition. Sugar is used as a flavor enhancer, and in addition, it gives sausages (and semi-finished products, by the way, too) an attractive color. On average, 10 to 20 teaspoons of sugar are used per kilogram of product. Roughly speaking, every 100 g of sausage contains at least 5 g of sugar.
You will also be interested in reading:
Giving up sugar is easy: just 5 simple steps
10 cool ways to misuse sugar