Has Sugar Hijacked Our Foods?

When it comes to nutrition, experts seem to disagree on virtually everything, especially when it comes to the optimal diet. But, across the board, ALL health experts can agree on one thing: some forms of sugar are killing us.

Two Kinds of Sugar

Today, we know that there are two very different sugars, those naturally occurring in foods and those which are added to foods. Naturally occurring sugars are those found in fruits and milk. Added sugars are those added to foods during preparation or processing. These added sugars are the ones causing our current obesity and diabetes crises.

Sixty-One Different Names for Sugar

We often think of the second type of sugar as ones we can easily cut out of our diets by cutting out typically sweet foods such as desserts and sodas. But today, this added sugar is hidden in approximately three-quarters of the processed food we find on the store shelves. And these added sugars are hiding under sixty-one different names. So, cutting them out is more difficult than it sounds.

Confusing Labeling

To further confuse things, we now have labeling that may not mean what we think it does. Sugar-free doesn’t mean the food is free from sugar but has less than .5 grams per serving. Reduced sugar means that the food has 25% less sugar than a serving size of the regular version. The term “low-sugar” is not even defined and can mean whatever the manufacturer decides it means.

Food and Market Share

Although sugar was something we began using historically to enhance the taste of foods, when our food began to be processed in large quantities by corporations, those food manufacturers discovered that adding sugars to their food greatly improved its taste. This caused people to choose their foods over the competition. Now, every food manufacturer is adding sugars in their rush for market share. And, in the meantime, it is killing us.

Great Grandma Wouldn’t Recognize It

Over the last two generations, our taste buds have become conditioned to want these sweetened foods in lieu of what our great grandmothers ate. The oatmeal that she made tastes nothing like the highly processed sweetened version we buy at the store. Yogurt has gone from one of the healthier foods on the planet to a dessert-like substance with little nutritional value. And yet we maintain the myth that these two foods are still healthy.

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Making Our Food More Palatable

With the morphing of our taste buds in the wake of processed foods, we continue to look for more natural substances to make our foods more palatable and yet cut the refined and processed sugars from our diets. Toda

y, we have a small berry that has been used for centuries by native cultures in West Africa called the miracle fruit. At MiraBurst®, we are striving to bring the miracle berry to the population as a viable alternative to sugar-laden foods. Visit our website to understand how the miracle berry may become a true miracle in the fight against obesity and diabetes.