Understanding Nutrition Facts
How to understand labels in a supermarket, or food tables and online apps.
How to read the label with fructose malapsorption or HFI.
When reading labels, it's important to be able to recognize ingredients that contain high amounts of fructose, sucrose or sorbitol or what ingredients are safe to eat. It can be hard to detect this information because you will need to be familiar with ingredients and sweeteners that are high in these sugars or sugar alchohols and which alternatives that are suitable.
In addition, the generic term "sugar" used in nutritional information tables not only refers to white sugar, but to the sum total of all types of sugar. Frusano products are sweetened only with fructose free alternatives, so they predominantly contain dextrose and maltose. However, these sugars are not distinguished on a normal Nutrition Facts label.
Regulations regarding food declaration demand that the detailed nutritional information indicated on packaging must contain the sum of all sugar types, declared under the generic term "sugar" even though the product may contain very different sugar types. Glucose, fructose, sucrose and maltose are all called "sugar" within the meaning of the law.
This is why we always provide detailed information on every sugar type in every product. This way, people who cannot handle certain sugars know exactly what kind of sweetener is used.
Is that all? No. The pitfalls of Static Nutrional Values
As if the calculation "What is fructose-free/what can I tolerate?" with total fructose content, portion size and individual tolerance threshold didn't have enough variables, there is another: nature does not standardise its products.
Apples, for example, have a medium to high fructose content. In food lists, tables and apps apples are usually stated to have around 5.7 grams of fructose per 100 grams of apple.
But these resources have pitfalls: Not all apples are the same. The fructose content varies depending on the type of apple and degree of ripeness. Even two apples of the same variety could in fact have a different amount of fructose grams. Nature is not a clean room with a controlled experimental setup. The results are correspondingly variable. These average values should be used as a very rough guide to orient yourself to the general content of ingredients. At Frusano we are able to control our fructose values by using fruits or vegetables that are naturally very low in fructose, and regularly testing our products.
As a reminder, these are our thresholds for "Fructose-free and Low-fructose:"
"Fructose-free": Total fructose (fructose + half of the sucrose) < 0.5g/100g
"Low-fructose": Total fructose (fructose + half of the sucrose) < 5g/100g
If you look at our packaging and website in detail, you'll see: We don't just say "fructose-free" and "low-fructose", we also state separate limits for fructose and sucrose. This is due to these expected variationas that you can see when you work with natural ingredients. Take a look at example variations in a product below.
Here it's possible to see that sometimes a natural product, like a strawberry, for instance, can have higher levels of fructose or sucrose depending on many different factors. At Frusano, we create our products with the natural variation in mind so that we can take on the responsibility of monitoring fructose amounts. Due to many years of experience, we are able to create recipes for products that will always be low in fructose.
To find more information about how we calculate Total Fructose or the differences bewteen fructose free and low fructose please visit our page Fructose-free and low Fructose.
