If I eat a strawberry thats non-added sugar. If I sprinkle sugar on the strawberry, thats added sugar.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
The new version of the nutrition label specifically calls out added sugars [1], so it sounds like if there are gray areas the FDA has been able to decide on a standard.
Right, but right now there's not a super strong incentive for companies to try and manipulate their added sugar label. It can be a marketing thing for some brands but if added sugar was actively penalized then you would start seeing better attempts to keep foods sweet with "non-sugar" sources.
This is probably the right way to think about it at an individual level. Eating berries and fruits in season is probably quite healthy and corn-syrup added processed food unhealthy. But we've already seen how companies obfuscate. For example "Nitrates" have been demonized. So know you'll see "natural" or "healthy" food making using of "celery extract," which is really just "natural nitrates."
It's less clear than you might think. Food producers have already adjusted to parents rejecting high sugar products by producing foods that are similar, but use fruit or fruit juice as the sweetener. They often advertise that there is no added sugar.
And what about a pasta that ends up with some sugars from the process of being made? What's the difference between "natural pasta" and "sugar added pasta"?
> If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
This is not true; juice has useful nutrients. You can make vegetable and fruit juices which are fairly low in sugar and are packed with vitamins and minerals.
And you tend to get enough of those nutrients from other sources of food nowadays. While it's true that some juices can have less sugar in them, the most common ones don't. Apple juice will not have less sugar than a soda.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.