News - Nutrition
Secret ingredients, secret truths.
By Daniel Lynch, Nutritionist and C.F.T
Health foods can be confusing: labels are often filled with terms and even stories, are they truths or just gimmicky marketing language ? “Organic” is a regulated term and is indeed meaningful, but “agave nectar, dehydrated cane juice, local and all-natural” are not straightforward. First let’s look at, since they taste so good, sugars.
Food companies know we like sugar, but also that Americans are becoming more health conscience. More people are associating refined sugars to heart disease, obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. As a result, many of us are striving to switch from refined to unrefined sweeteners. Unrefined sugars? In the world of health food talk, unrefined sweeteners are generally regarded as those processed in a way to preserve their nutrients. Food companies catching onto this trend, have started using new names for sugars in the ingredinets of many food. If I grab a bar of chocolate and I check the ingredients and see “beet sugar” or “dehydrated cane juice,” I could think, ‘great, beets are healthy and so is juice.’ Then maybe I'll buy this over a Hershey's bar because these new ingredient terms lead me to believe it's unrefined sugar.
It is possible the sugars are unrefined, but there is no guarntee. These terms are not regulated to guarantee that these sugars are anything different from white, refined sugar.
The easiest way to know what type of sugar you’re using is if you’re adding it to foods yourself, like while you're cooking. Rapadura and Sucanant are two truely unrefined cane sugars which I know of. If you comparing Rapadura and Sucanant to refined sugars, the unrefined ones are deeper brown and are granular, irregular pellets. The refined sugars are crystalline, nearly symmetrical squares. Even so-called brown sugars are refined.
Aside from Rapadura and Sucanat, which are unrefined sugars from cane sugar plants, there are other unrefined options. Maple syrup and raw honey are two great examples. Maple syrup is indeed very processed: it requires much effort to transform it from its nearly water origin into a sweet, thick syrup. But this process doesn't eliminate the nutrients; it’s a process of conentraion through boiling off extra water. This is also true of the unrefined cane sugars. They’re concentrated and still contain trace minerals.
Another interesting unrefined sweetener is brown rice syrup. Brown rice as you probably noticed, is not sweet. You probably also know it as ‘high-carb.’ The carbohydrates in brown rice are complex, and thus not sweet. The complex carbs can be reduced to smaller carbohydrates. It’s smaller carbohydrate units which taste sweet. The reduction of the complex carbs in unrefined brown rice syrup is done by a type of microorganism called Aspergillus. Hints for truly unrefined brown rice syrups made by Aspergillus would be would be “Koji enzymes” or “Aspergillus” in the ingredients or someplace on the label.
I highly recommend the effort to obtaining unrefined sweeteners. The extra nutrients they provide are always benefical and the role of refined sweeteners in many of our most prevalent disease should not be underestimated. But also, they taste good: nobody should expect healthy foods to be bland tortures. These sugars can be used as a rewarding dessert or as spices and flavor enhancements in regular cooking. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to know if sugars are truly unrefined when they're listed on the ingredients of already prepared foods like desserts, baked goods and so on. If a prepared food you eat daily has, say, brown rice syrup within the ingredients you could call the food manufacturer and ask, ‘Is your brown rice syrup created with Koji cultures?’ Or you might just try making it yourself. Nick, the co-founder of imsuperb.com, being unsatisfied with suspicious ingredients on his formerly favorite ice-cream, makes his own ice cream with very good results and without too much effort. So help me harass him to get a recipe up. 
