When I came home from the doctor that advised me to cut all refined sugar from my diet, the first thing I did was down three of the pain killers he subscribed me. This helped me get over the fear of purging all things sugar from my house.

Truth be told, the items that were straight up “sugar” were easy to toss. Containers of white & raw brown sugar, honey, agave, maple syrup, molasses (Zeus’s pinky, I had a lot of sweeteners in the cupboards) met an untimely end in the trash can. The actual “food stuff” with added sugar, a little bit more of a pain in the ass. Yes, there were a couple of cans of soda pop and a half eaten pint of ice cream that were easy to identify as sugar laden but other foods – hot damn, there is sugar in places where you wouldn’t think existed.

Bread, sauces, pasta, packaged fruit cups, yogurt, cereal, BBQ flavored chips, ranch flavored anything, salad dressings, fruit juices, a boat load of frozen dinners, frozen pizzas, maple sausages, turkey hot dogs, turkey bacon, ham, canned veggies. Yea, that took a little beating in the food wallet but then it got worse.

Let’s play a game:

These are ingredient lists taken from items that were in my pantry. Can you identify all the different names for sugar in these pictures? (Hint: there’s 2 or more names for sugar in each list)

According to the webs, there’s about 56-61 known names for sugar. From a chemical point of view, the only difference between these added “sugars” are the names – your body will metabolize them all in the same way.

Now, what made this all a little more fakakta (thank you Jewish grandmothers for such a wonderful word) was that these food labels above where/are for items that are considered “healthy”. Muesli, granola, high fiber pancake mix and a meal replacement shake. Not only was “sugar” within the first three ingredients but also you saw it again under other aliases later down the list such as “fructose”, “refiner’s syrup”, “high fructose corn syrup” & “maltodextrin”.  Food companies were literally placing sugar on top of sugar in their products. And you can’t trust the nutrition information on labels. Not only can a manufacture be off by 20% by what they are reporting on the label concerning sugar grams but if a product has 0.5 grams or less of sugar per serving (cause we all only eat one serving, right?), the FDA allows for the information grams to be rounded down to zero.

By the time I went through all my food and threw out everything that had added refined sugar in it, all that was left in my kitchen was an orange, a couple of wilted celery stalks, and an expired half drunk carton of milk.

So as I stood there looking at my overflowing trash can and empty fridge, trying to fight off the urge to do some frugal induced dumpster divin’, I was thinking “How the f*ck does everything have sugar in it!?!”….

And when I found out…

I’ll share that experience soon.