Where Sugar Lurks & Avoiding Sweet Chemical Soup Part 1

Sugar.

It's everywhere.

Hubby and I switched to natural and organic foods a long time ago. We used honey and stevia to sweeten our homemade desserts and didn't buy the sugary ones in the store.

We were doing well, or so we thought. 

Then we watched Hungry for Change, and it made us think. What about all of our other food? Is there sugar there?

We had avoided HFCS in all of our foods. We refused to touch High Fructose Corn Syrup. However, we never thought to check the labels for sugar.

Guess what....?

Recently we went through our cabinets & started pulling things off the shelves. Re-reading the labels. As a label reader, I couldn't believe I had some how overlooked this!

We found sugar in all of these items:

• Salad dressing ( yep, even italian!)
• Worchestershire sauce
• Steak sauce
• Dijon Mustard
• Pizza sauce
• and other items.

We were shocked.

On our next shopping trip we decided to find alternative brands without sugar. Believe it or not, we could not find a worchestershire or steak sauce without sugar. Not one. Not even the natural organic kinds. There was nothing.

We had stopped buying BBQ sauce a while ago due to the fact we couldn't find one without junk in it.

This is sad.

Other places where sugar lurked as we browsed the grocery shelves:

• Tortilla chips
• BBQ sauce
• Ketchup ( even the organic & natural varieties)
• canned diced tomatoes
• canned corn
• yogurts

I always knew that there was sugar in a lot of foods. HFCS I knew lurked in many places (we discovered that when we eliminated it from our diet). Hubby and I didn't eat sweets for the simple reason of avoiding sugar, but we found refined white sugar in nearly everything as we walked through the store.

There are the obvious places where sugar lurks:

• Ice cream
• Cakes
• Cookies
• Pie
• Brownies
• Fudge
• Breads
• Cupcakes
• Streusel
• Soda
• Juice boxes
• Sweet tea

But it doesn't end there.

Sugar is bad for you. 
But so are artificial sweeteners.

Some of the artificial sweeteners are:

• Aspartame
• Acesulfame potassium 
• Neotame
• Saccharin
• Sucralose
• ...and others

You may see these as Equal, Splenda, Sweet N Low, NutraSweet, etc. 

These are no good either.
It seems that the items touting "sugar free" labels, contained chemicals.
Great......{sarcasm}

I don't want to consume those either. 

More on why I don't like artificial sweeteners & why to avoid sugar in Part 2

Be Happy Healthy & Strong,

Lolli

~Resources can be found in Part 3.

~Disclaimer here.