How can a food item (ex. Oat Milk) have on its Nutrition Facts label (Includes [x]g of Added Sugars) and yet no form of sugar is listed on its Ingredients Label? Am I being lied to by this food company?
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According to the FDA certain types of processing the ingredients that are done specifically to make the food have more sugar still have to count as “added sugar
Basically instead of the manufacturers going “alright, toss this sugar in” the actually *turn some of the food into sugar even if it wasn’t sugar before.* This, as far as we can tell affects the body the same way as “added sugar” so it needed to be labeled as such.
For oat milk they basically take some of the oat starch and process the starch into sugar. This is possible because starch is basically made up of a bunch of sugar molecules that are chemically bonded together, so you just need to break that starch apart to get sugar.
Think of starch as a long chain and sugar as a single link in that chain. If you have a full chain you have starch, if you break it up into individual links you have sugar.
They may not add the sugar but it may already occurs in one or more of the ingredients.
Orange juice ingredients would be juice. But there’s a lot of natural sugar in it.
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