An illiterate person may avoid sugar but may depend on honey or even jaggery to sweeten his food. Such innocent souls might consider honey or jaggery to be a sugarless substitute for sugar. But when a well-read person wonders why his blood sugar   is not under controls even after he controls his sugar in his milk, tea or coffee, doesn’t eat ice creams, puddings, sweets etc. He needs to review his dietary intake. Perhaps his dietincludes many hidden sugars.Even the educated may be caught unawares. The description of his breakfast gave the answer. He had described it as sugar free breakfast. It includes a glass of packed juice, labelled ‘no added sugar’ and multigrain muesli with raisins. Even fresh juice would be a sugar shot for diabetics, let alone the packed, no-added sugar variety, since even if no sugar is added; the juice is in a concentrated form and is high in sugar dried raisins and honey will also raise his sugar his sugar graph.

Many foods, even the ones labeled as health foods, have hidden sugar. Ready made pasta sauces, canned vegetables and fruits, packets soups and breads- all contain sugar, which is used to improve their shelf and enhance flavour. If you read labels of some popular ‘low-fat health bars’, you will be in for a rude shock. The ingredients may include: sugar (sucrose), rolled oats, dextrose (another from of sugar), wheat flakes, rice, dried lemon, soybeans, fructose (sugar form) and corn syrup (sugar form).

Some natural forms of sugar are milk sugar and fruit sugar (fructose). The sweeter the fruit, the more the fruit sugar content in it, like mangoes. Remember, if a person is diagnosed with hypoglycemia (low sugar), he should have milk or fruits as last thing before going to bed at night. Then the person will not suffer from hypoglycemia during the middle of night or early in the morning.

Some of the many disguised forms of sugar are honey, dextrose, fructose, corn syrup, high-frutose corn syrup, fruit-juice concentrate, galactose, lactose, poly-dextrose, mannitol, sorbitol, xylitol, maltodextrin and turbinado sugar. So one should be well informed. Therefore, knowledge of what we are eating is a must so that we are not fooled in by so-called ‘healthy’, low fat, low-sugar foods and instead make smart choices.