Food manufacturers use confusing marketing terms to hide the true amount of sugar in their foods, and this is something you need to be aware of. You may ask yourself, why are the food manufacturers load their products with so much sugar. The answer is simple: Taste and palatability. When the food manufacturers removed all naturally occuring good fats from their products, they had to replace them with sugar so that they are sell-able to consumers. It is that simple!
Meanwhile, you might have already gotten the memo that food ingredients ending in the letters "-ose" are science-y words for sugar – the sweet ingredient that can cause obesity, inflammation, heart disease, and even feeds cancer cells if you consume uncontrolled amounts of it. In a nutshell...
Glucose is the simplest form of sugar (in terms of its chemical formula). It does not taste sweet by itself unless mixed with fructose and other sugars. It is the body's main fuel source.
Fructose is the sugar that naturally occurs in fruit. It tastes very sweet and is often added to processed foods and marketed as a "natural cane sugar-free replacement".
Sucrose is your common white table sugar. Sucrose is the formal name for table sugar and is made from a combination of equal quantities of glucose and fructose. It is sweet due to its fructose content.
Dextrose is chemically identical to glucose, and often added to processed food as a sweetener.
Maltose is also known as malt sugar. It is made out of two glucose molecules bound together, and is found in foods that contain barley and malt.
Lactose is known as milk sugar and is made of a combination of galactose and glucose. It's primarily found in dairy foods, and is also added to breads, processed snacks and baked goods.
Galactose has the same chemical formula as glucose. It is similar to glucose in its structure, differing only in the position of its elements. This difference, however, gives galactose different chemical and biochemical properties to glucose. It is found in legumes and dairy products.
It is important to read food labels carefully before buying a ready meal, or any industrially produced food product. Realize that there are 75 different names for sugar (there might be even more which are not included in this list). If you don't realize this, you won't know how much actual sugar you are consuming with the food you eat.
If you are interested in knowing more about sugar, please check out our downloadable E-Book (pdf file) on the subject.
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