Customers may be familiar with some ingredients on the labels on your food items. However, the way certain ingredients are worded might leave them confused and unable to make important health choices. In a Question and Answer column for the Columbus Dispatch, a medical professional named Dr. Roach is asked what "sugar alcohol" is when included on a label.
The question comes from a person who is pre-diabetic and confused about what "sugar alcohol" means and how much is safe for someone with that condition to consume. According to the doctor, however, sugar alcohol isn't actually the same thing as sugar, and shouldn't be considered as such when measuring calories.
As a result, he recommends that the sufferer think of different forms of measurement when approaching this particular additive.
"A rough but reasonable rule of thumb is to count about half the grams of sugar alcohol as sugar, for the purposes of counting sugar grams," he writes. "So, in your example, it would be about 6.5 grams of sugar."
Though this might be a useful thing for the consumer to keep in mind, why make them do all the work of finding this out for themselves? Diabetes is affecting so many in the United States, and can affect patients without them knowing it: More than 29 million Americans are not aware that they have diabetes at all, or are susceptible to it.
To counter this, candy labels can be adjusted to translate potentially misleading ingredients into facts that make sense to the casual reader. It could be a matter of health or sickness, and the manufacturer that has greater access to the right color label printers can make it easier to change packaging specifications.
Leave a Reply