Sugar by another name is still sugar, and NOT sweet to our health!

Sugar by another name is still sugar, and NOT sweet to our health!

This whole carb thing has been eye-opening, that’s for sure. And sometimes just plain frustrating. But once we learn something valuable, it becomes a great weapon in our battle against the never-ending battle to fight off those who would shove carbs at us from the most innocent-looking and unsuspecting sources.

Case in point: Just because you give up chips and snack crackers for the allowed Keto-friendly pork rinds, you still have to watch for sneaky Carbage Creep. If you have been eating pork rinds in plain AND “flavored” versions, and felt safe in doing so, well, guess what? Even though the label itself brags “0 Carbs” when  were reading the actual ingredients listed, you will discover SUGARS listed! Not just “SUGAR” by its original name, but by other names which have been adopted to hide the fact that they are nothing more than SUGAR. Ingredients like “maltodextrin,” “dextrose,” “hydrolized corn protein and modified corn starch” (face it, anything with the word “corn” in it is going to be loaded with carbs).

Then you will also notice that the way they get around it is to make the serving size so small that manufacturers can “legally” claim that it is “zero carbs” because they can round down the number of carbs to zero if it’s less than 1 gram of carbs. So here you may have been enjoying “zero carb” pork rinds only to find out that you have been eating sugar!

So how does “Big Food” get by with labeling something as “zero carb” when it actually contains sugar? Well, the serving size is another pitfall one has to watch out for.

A personal experience: A few months back I was SO excited to find a pork rub at the grocery store that actually bragged to be “zero carbs” on its label. But when I got home I also noticed that the serving size was…wait for it… one-fourth of a teaspoon! WHO PUTS ONE-FOURTH OF A TEASPOON OF RUB ON ANYTHING???? Anything over that was going to start tallying up the carb count. I shared that with a friend of mine who lives in Texas and she told me that in Texas, anyone who got caught using  just one-fourth of a teaspoon of rub on their barbecue would be summarily shot. LOL!! So I took it back to the store, unopened, and got a refund and the “reason” they asked was that it was NOT “zero carb” as the label said. It was pretty expensive so I wasn’t just going to chalk it off as a loss.

So it behooves us to start watching labels a bit more closely. After the pork rinds revelation, you may even want to watch them rabidly. It is absolutely insidious how the government has allowed the food industry to falsely label their ingredients and keep people hooked….yes, sugar is an addiction…on sugar.  So put on your reading glasses when you go to the store, use your cell phone calculator if you must, to figure out serving sizes and see just how truthful a label is before plunking down your hard-earned cash for something that’s going to do you ZERO GOOD because of the hidden carbs.

This is a list of “61 Names of Sugar” produced by LowCarbSpark.com. If you search for similar lists, you will find those lists that start numbering sugars in the forties. Then into the fifties. This one is 61. And there’s now even one includes SEVENTY-FIVE!

Here is another list that includes not only the “hidden names” of sugars, but also the names of artificial sweeteners, some of which also contain carbs.

Yes, the learning curve may try to derail you at times. But simply hop right back on track, dust yourself off, and chalk up another thing you know that you can avoid in the future. That’s the good thing about this low-carb lifetyle (it’s NOT a diet), when you discover some nasty surprises (like sugar-loaded pork rinds), you can just stop doing that thing, or do things differently next time, and start over every day with a clean slate. And, isn’t your health worth it?

STAY TUNED FOR ANOTHER POST ABOUT HIDDEN SUGARS… IN MEAT!!! Who even knew meat would have sugar in it???

#lowcarbjc