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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:

Amasake
Apple sugar
Barbados sugar
Bark sugar
Barley malt
Barley malt syrup
Beet sugar
Brown rice syrup
Brown sugar
Cane juice
Cane sugar
Caramelized foods
Carbitol
Carmel coloring
Carmel sugars
Concentrated fruit juice
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Date sugar
Dextrin
Dextrose
Diglycerides
Disaccharides
D-tagalose
Evaporated cane juice
Evaporated cane juice
Florida crystals
Fructooligosaccharides (FOS)
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrate
Galactose
Glucitol
Glucoamine
Gluconolactone
Glucose
Glucose polymers
Glucose syrup
Glycerides
Glycerine
Glycerol
Glycol
Hexitol
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Inversol
Invert sugar
Isomalt
Karo syrups
Lactose
Levulose
"Light" sugar
"Lite" sugar
Malitol
Malt dextrin
Malted barley
Maltodextrins
Maltodextrose
Maltose
Malts
Mannitol
Mannose
Maple syrup
Microcrystalline cellulose
Molasses
Monoglycerides
Monosaccarides
Nectars
Neotame
Pentose
Polydextrose
Polyglycerides
Powdered sugar
Raisin juice
Raisin syrup
Raw sugar
Ribose rice syrup
Rice malt
Rice sugar
Rice sweeteners
Rice syrup solids
Saccharides
Sorbitol
Sorghum
Sucanat
Sucanet
Sucrose
Sugar cane
Trisaccharides
Turbinado sugar
Unrefined sugar
White sugar
Xylitol
Zylose

Most of us like some sweet things. The best alternatives to sugar and high fructose corn syrup can be found in natural, whole fruits. If you need something sweet added to tea or to cook with, you might consider a little honey or if you can get hold of it, Stevia is a very sweet natural herb that you need very little of to gain a sweet benefit. Avoid artificial sweeteners entirely. They are not safe. Aspartame (NutraSweet) should be particularly avoided as it is a neurotoxin and poses a grave health risk to human beings.

Ideally, we need to overhaul our diets completely and totally avoid refined sugars. We need to go back to the way people ate before the industrial revolution and the advent of food processing technologies. If we do this, we will protect ourselves from the modern plagues of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.