Foods purchased today often contain one or more caloric sweeteners. Food ingredient statements now list a wide variety of alternative carbohydrate sweeteners. Everyday alternative sweeteners include products manufactured from various cereal starches (corn is the most common), an assortment of juice concentrates and sugar alcohols.

Most alternative carbohydrate sweeteners are not used for sweetening. Except for some of the fructose-rich syrups, the remaining substitute carbohydrate sweeteners are considerably less sweet than sugar.

In addition, different artificial sweeteners may be used. The common noncaloric sweeteners are aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K and saccharin. Artificial sweeteners are decidedly sweeter than sugar.

What is sugar?

Food and Drug Administration regulations restrict how food manufacturers can use the term “sugar” in any ingredient statement. Whenever the word “sugar” appears in a list of ingredients, it is limited to only sucrose obtained from sugar cane or sugar beets. This means that there is absolutely no difference between sugar from sugar beets and sugar from sugar cane.