Tea, coffee, milk shakes and desserts.

Most people have a love-hate relationship with these sugary delights. What better than a steaming cup of tea with hot pakoras on a rainy day? And can anything beat the cooling effect of an ice-cream sundae on a hot afternoon? Yes, you love them for sure! But with all this health-revolution thing going around, you also hate them for piling on all those calories.

So what do you do to stay in shape and in good health? You say “bye-bye” to all these favorite beverages and sweets. Some people completely ban out sugar from their lives. Sugarless tea, sugarless sweets, sugarless candy, sugarless gum….in short, you have a “sugar-less life”. Or so you’d like to think! Not adding spoonfuls of sugar into your morning cuppa, or avoiding those yummy gulab jamuns does not ensure that you become healthy or actually become sugar-free!

What’s more, even if you stick to a sugar-substitute sweetener throughout your day, you still get some sugar. For e g: if you consume any dairy product, you automatically consume sugar in the form of lactose! So if you consume anything with glucose, fructose, sucrose, corn syrup, molasses, honey, dextrose, sorghum, lactose, maltose, galactose, concentrated grape juice, just assume that you're getting some form of sugar.

Here are a few sources with sugar hidden in them. We bet you did not count these when you were planning a sugar-free diet!

Canned Juice: Yes, juice is good for you. But only when it is freshly squeezed before consumption. Canned juice might be so very trendy and yummy, but it’s just a lot of sugar mixed in with preservatives, artificial flavors, colors and hopefully some juice! It is much better and healthier to eat a whole fruit and benefit from the vitamins, minerals and fiber you get naturally.

Breakfast Cereal: Once again, cereal has been touted to be the healthiest breakfast option. But what have the manufacturers done? To suit the palates of different people, they have come up with so many varieties – with loads of sugar piled in each! Honey, fruit, vanilla, chocolate – all these flavors in cereal come at an extra cost, the cost of health. Research says that one cup of sugary cereal packs in more than 8 tea spoons of sugar. That is actually the recommended daily intake of sugar, by the way!

Low Fat/Fat-Free Foods: When fat is removed from a certain food, it is bound to taste bland and flavorless. So how to the manufacturers improve the taste? Simple, add some sugar to it! And there goes all your hope of losing weight!

Soft Drinks: OK, you must have already guessed this one. Yes, aerated drinks
Are the Number One defaulter where hidden sugar is concerned. But little do you know that healthier options like fruit squashes and lemonade also contain a lot of sugar. It is important to limit your intake of these “healthier” drinks also.

Alcohol: “Whaat? That bitter tasting drink contains excess sugar?” Yes, that’s right! Why else do you think they call it the “Beer-Belly”? Beer contains loads of sugar and calories. So does wine. And when you mix up drinks with juices and other stuff to make those yummy cocktails….ever counted the calories? Research says that one drinking session of 3-4 mixed drinks can pile on your recommended weekly sugar dose!

Yogurt: Flavored yogurt also comes with extra calories in the form of excess sugar. So it’s best to stick with plain old dahi!

Salads: Don’t believe it? Why don’t you find out how that salad dressing was made? Most salad dressings pile on a little fat and quite a bit of sugar/honey to give it that satisfying taste. What to do? Stick with a simple lemon-salt dressing for your salads.

The best way to banish unhealthy sugar from your diet is to read the labels on everything you buy. If the ingredients on the label contain Brown sugar, Corn sweetener, Corn syrup, Dextrose, Fructos, Fruit juice concentrate, Glucose, High-fructose corn syrup, Honey, Invert sugar, Lactose, Maltose, Malt syrup, Molasse, Raw sugar, Sucrose, Syrup, Table sugar etc, you know you are holding a sugary-delight!