Sugar is found naturally in many foods including fruit and grains and eaten in these naturally occurring foods is good for us. Unfortunately, the standard American diet is replete with processed, nutrient deficient foods which contain a daily average of twenty teaspoons of additional refined sugar.

Refined sugar is used in most processed foods and is very damaging to human health and compromises the immune system. For
example, two cans of soft drink contain twenty four teaspoons of sugar and lower the efficiency of your white blood cells by ninety two percent. Furthermore, this consequence can last up to five hours. Your white blood cells are an important component of your immune system so if you are exposed to a virus or bacteria after you have had a couple of soft drinks, your immune system may not be able to defend you against the intruder.

High sugar intake is also responsible for blood sugar spikes which cause your pancreas and adrenal glands to overwork as they are caught up in an unhealthy cycle trying to stabilize your blood glucose levels. Eventually, the pancreas and adrenals burn out on a high sugar diet leading to Type 2 diabetes, chronic fatigue, hypoglycemia, and early menopause.

Refined sugar is without nutrients, which means that your body needs to take nutrients from its reserves in order to metabolize it. So not only does it not give you life-sustaining nutrition, it robs you of it.

The biggest problem with refined sugar is that it is often hidden in processed foods under other names and consumers are unaware that they are actually eating as much sugar as they actually are. Unless you are eating a totally natural food diet, avoiding processed foods altogether, you are probably consuming more refined sugars than you realize. Sugar is added to most packaged foods even if they are not sweet. It is actually hard to see how much sugar is in a product by simply reading the ingredient list. This is because there are many names used for refined sugar and a number of different ones can be used in a single product. You therefore need to know the various names of the hidden sugars in processed foods so that you can be an informed consumer.

To make it easier to identify the sugars in packaged food products, here is a list of a hundred alternative names for hidden sugars: