Last week I was having fun exploring Eat It online (an organic, Winnipeg-based health food store). They have wonderful products, and one product that jumped out at me was a blueberry hemp muffin. The company claimed that the muffin is “dairy, sugar and egg free”*. I clicked over to check out their ingredients list.
Lo and behold, the third ingredient in the list is honey.
Newsflash: honey is a form of sugar!
It’s irritating when a company claims that their product is sugar-free (or “sugar free”), and then it turns out that there is simply some kind of sugar in it other than granulated sugar (or, worse, artificial sweeteners). I fully understand that honey is considerably less processed and has far more nutrients than refined white sugar, but that does not detract from the fact that honey is still a form of sugar.
If a baker wants their muffin to really be healthy or free of added sugars, they should substitute fruit (pureed works well) for the sugar. At any rate, a muffin with honey in it should be advertised as a muffin with sugar rather than without any sugar.
The funny part about all of this is that if the claim on the website had instead said, “sweetened with honey”, I would have been far more impressed with the nutritional stats. Rhetoric is powerful. By altering just a word or two, the producer can completely change the attitude of the consumer.
*The lack of punctuation on their website made me cringe.
it drives me bananas (no pun intended!) when i read “no sugar!” in a recipe title and then upon reading the ingredients…contains mass amounts of honey, agave, or “organic” sugar. LOL!
thanks for posting on this sagan.
Bananas indeed! Tasty tasty natural-sugar bananas 😀