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Researchers at the University of British Columbia suggest that people could be overestimating the amount of calories that come from added sugars in baked goods.
That's because the amount of sugar and calories that appear on food nutrition labels is often calculated from the sum of all the ingredients in a recipe -- and not the final product.
The researchers made cakes using two different types of sugar and compared the amount of sugar that remained after the cakes were baked.
Study lead author, UBC food science PhD student Ningjian Liang, says the cake made with invert sugar lost as much as 20 to 25 per cent of the sugar content when baked at 180 C and the cake made with sucrose lost up to 10 per cent.
"The cakes made with invert sugar ended up containing fewer digestible calories derived from sugar than those made with sucrose. It was no longer sugar — it had been converted," she says.
Professor David Kitts of UBC’s faculty of land and food systems says they found that the amount of sugar lost during baking depended not only on the type of sugar used but on "the baking temperature, and other attributes of the recipe — for example, the amino-acid content in the dough."
For those that are counting calories, Kitts says it's important to keep in mind that the calories from sugar indicated on a label may not accurately reflect the actual calories people consume from sugar.
Their findings have been published in the Journal of Nutrition and Food Sciences.
