By Chung Hee-hyung
With the summer temperature reaching a record high level, nothing is more tempting than a can of soft drink in quenching one’s thirst. But increasing concerns on health led consumers to look for alternatives that are just as sweet as large sugary drinks but much lower in calories. Soda companies obliged to their customers’ demand and launched a variety of drinks with labels “no added sugar,” “sugar free” or even “zero calories.” Some manufacturers went further and introduced natural fruit or vitamin drinks to lure even the most health conscious consumers.
Experts warn, however, that such labels could be misleading. “Sugar-free doesn’t mean it contains no sugar at all,” said Lee Guen-bae, head of the food inspection division of Shinsaegae Department Store. “It just means the drink has no sucrose, a highly refined pure carbohydrate more commonly known as table sugar. Although sucrose is the most widely used sugar in food and drink, there are countless substitutes that are just as bad.”
A case in point is corn syrup, or more precisely high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). A combination of glucose and fructose, the name refers to a group of corn syrups that has undergone enzymatic processing to convert some of its glucose to fructose. The percentage of fructose contained in HFCS – 55 percent – is almost as same as table sugar, and chemically they are virtually identical.
“Whatever difference the two may have is just semantic. Nutrition wise, they are equally bad for health,” said Lee. Under current law, however, only sucrose qualifies as sugar, and manufacturers are allowed to label its product as “sugar free” even if it contains a large dose of HFCS. The end result is a drink that is supposedly sugar free but in fact packed with enough calories to make any effort to lose weight fruitless at best.
“No added sugar” label could be equally misleading. “You should read the label quite literally – it just says the maker has not ‘added’ more sugar in the manufacturing process,” said Cho jung-eun of Juvis, a company specializing in weight loss programs. “It doesn’t mean it had no sugar in the first place.”
“No added sugar” label is most commonly seen in fruit juice, because the original fruit already has sufficient sugar to make the drink sweet enough. As a result, they have comparable level of sugar and just as much calories.
To be sure, sugars in fruit are not as bad as processed sugars like sucrose or HFCS. During digestion, fruit sugars release glucose into bloodstream less rapidly, placing lesser burden on the liver when it converts the original glucose into glycogen. Fruits themselves are rich in vitamins and minerals, and their abundance in fiber slows digestion to a low enough level that prevents blood sugar from rising too fast after a meal.
“Unfortunately, all of these advantages go away when fruits are squeezed into juice,” said Cho. Fibers are destroyed in the process, and the extracted liquid ends up in condensed form which lacks most of the vitamins and minerals contained in the original fruit.
If drinks with “sugar free” or “no added sugar” labels contain just as much if not more calories than high-sugar drinks, what about drinks with “zero calories?”
To begin with, the label does not mean that it contains no calories at all. The current law allows drink companies to advertise their products as zero calorie drinks as long as they contain less than 4 kilocalories per 100ml; for instance, a 250ml “Coke Zero” has in fact five kilocalories.
Soda companies point out that the amount is negligible. It is less than one-twentieth of the original Coke, and even its most avid fan would not drink twenty cans of soft drink a day.
More contentious are artificial sweeteners widely used in these zero calorie drinks. Artificial sweeteners have similar energy content to sugar – roughly four kilocalories per gram. These compounds, however, have many times of sweetness of sucrose, which means they can deliver the same degree of sweet taste with only a fraction of the amount required for sugars. Drink companies seemed to find a sweep spot at last – “diet” drinks that taste just as good as the original but contain no sugars that might lead to excessive weight. Artificial sweeteners handsomely met this seemingly impossible demand, and they have largely taken the place of sugars in drinks.
It is not without of drawbacks, of course, the first of which is its slightly odd taste. Tastes of normal sugars have short life span, hitting sweetness receptors on the tongue and then dissipating from them fairly quickly. Artificial sweeteners, on the other hand, leave a lingering metallic taste because they tend to touch on receptors for bitterness as well. Companies try to avoid this problem by mixing various compounds that may cover up the shortfall of individual chemicals.
The matter is not simply of bad taste, of course. Even since saccharine (the first commercially available artificial sweetener) was introduced in the early 1900s, critiques have been charging that they lead to multiple health problems including obesity, diabetes and even cancer. Regulators took note, and several compounds were put on the Food and Drug Administration’s list of suspected carcinogen. One research in the late 1960s linked saccharine to malignant tumors in rats.
Since then, countless researches on the chemicals’ possibly harmful effect have flooded the medical community. The result is decidedly mixed, and the best which can be said is that so far no direct linkage between artificial sweeteners and obesity or cancer has been established. “The general consensus in the scientific community is that they are harmless when consumed in moderation,” reported the TIME magazine.
Lee Guen-bae advises consumers to closely watch nutrition tables when buying drinks. “Don’t accept words like ‘no added sugar’ or ‘sugar free’ at face value. Rather, to make an informed judgment, look at the overall amount of sugars and calories at the bottom of the nutrition table.”
For soda drink fans who might be confused by all these warnings, Lee left one last deceptively simple advice.
“Sticking to plain water is the best guard against taking excessive calories, however tasteless it may sound.”