Speaker: What about sugar free foods?

Kathy Reily: We really have to be careful about sugar free or no sugar added foods. When you see those terms on the food label, it still is very important to go directly to the label and look at the serving size and still look to see how much total carbohydrate is in that particular food. Sugar free and no sugar added is misleading and it really is not true. The only sugar that is required to be left out of those particular food, according to our labeling laws is, sucrose and that is the white table sugar that you can actually go to the grocery store and buy, but there are many other different kinds of sugar which we can add to our foods and some of those are added to sugar free and no sugar added foods. An example would be sugar free ice cream. If you buy sugar free ice cream, you would still check the serving size. It will be half a cup and check the total carbohydrate. It won't have sucrose in it, but some of the other examples of different sugars might be sorbitol or mannitol, lactitol, xylitol and these are used quite freely in some of our sugar free and no sugar added foods. So they still will have sugar in them, which is a carbohydrate and they will have an affect on the blood sugar.