The Hidden Sugars Guide

If a product has an ingredient list, scan it for anything ending in ose (glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose), any kind of syrup, and any juice concentrate. Those are sugar. Ingredients are listed by weight, so the higher up the list they appear, the more there is.

How Canadian labels actually work

This is the part worth knowing, because it makes you faster in the aisle. Under Canada’s Food and Drug Regulations, all sugar-based ingredients must be grouped in one set of brackets immediately after the common name Sugars, listed heaviest first, and positioned in the ingredient list by their combined weight.

So on a compliant Canadian package you are not hunting scattered aliases. You look for the word Sugars in the ingredient list and read what is inside the brackets. If it appears in the first two or three ingredients, sugar is a main ingredient of that food, whatever the front of the box says.

Two things that rule does not catch, and they are the ones to keep an eye on: refined starches such as maltodextrin, which raise blood sugar quickly but are not counted as sugars, and sugars naturally present in ingredients like fruit juice concentrate used as a sweetener. The list of names below still matters for imported products, for older stock, and for reading a US label.

Added together, sugar is often the single biggest ingredient. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it, and the cart starts to change on its own.

More to recognize

Maltodextrin, dextrin, corn sweetener, glucose solids, diastatic malt, treacle, grape sugar, Barbados sugar, beet sugar, brown sugar, castor sugar, confectioner's or icing or powdered sugar, panela, panocha, sucanat, Florida crystals, yellow sugar, golden sugar, sweet sorghum, and anything labelled “crystals,” “solids,” “nectar” or “concentrate” after a fruit or cane name. The SugarScience team at UCSF counts at least 61 of these in all. If in doubt, it is probably sugar.

Here is the part the label will never highlight for you: sugar is not the only thing that floods your blood with glucose. Starch is literally long chains of glucose molecules linked together. The moment a starchy food reaches your mouth and gut, enzymes snip those chains apart and release the very same glucose that sugar delivers, only one step removed.

Refined and ultra processed starches move fastest of all, because the fibre and structure that would slow them down have been stripped away. White flour, white bread, white rice, most breakfast cereals, crackers, instant potato, and the maltodextrin quietly added to thousands of packaged foods all behave far more like sugar than most people expect.

The glycemic index scores how quickly a food raises blood glucose, on a scale where pure glucose is 100. Look closely: several everyday starches score higher than table sugar, even though nothing sweet was ever added to them.

Read that table twice. A slice of white bread, a bowl of cornflakes or a scoop of instant mashed potato can raise your blood sugar as much as, or more than, a spoonful of sugar. Maltodextrin is the clearest example. It is a cheap processed starch used as a filler, a thickener and a “no added sugar” stand in, and its glycemic index sits near 95, higher than table sugar and almost as high as pure glucose. You will find it in protein bars, sauces, seasoning blends and plenty of products that say “sugar free” right on the front.

This is exactly why the Trail Markers approach marks bread, rice, potatoes and cereal red, right beside candy and soda. Not because they taste sweet, but because of how fast they climb your blood sugar. In Base Camp and The Lookout, we reroute them one at a time, at a pace you can actually keep.