If you're anything like me, you watch your weight and what you eat, but you can always stand to lose a few pounds — or maybe 15 pounds. At any rate, you read the ingredients and the fat content and the calorie count on almost everything you pick up for the first time at the grocery store. More accurately, you skim over the ingredients looking for numbers higher than 2 or 3 and the ever present high-fructose corn syrup. The numbers are low. The sugar isn't there. You buy the product and feel proud of yourself all the way home and well into the consumption of your latest healthy find.

But you aren't exactly like me. You probably didn't spend over half of your life in the marketing world. If you have, by all means read on. You won't learn anything about marketing, but you may learn a little bit about that box of Kaschi in your cupboard. So back to the point... you aren't a marketer and you don't notice things like "evaporated cane juice crystals" and say to yourself "Wait a minute... what the hell are evaporated cane juice crystals?" Well, I'll tell you. They're magic marketing beans. They're "hey, this cereal has no sugar" crystals sending signals directly from the box, through your tired and not really paying attention brain and all the way back down to your money-holding fingertips.

They're snake oil.

According to CNN Health correspondent Dr. Melina Jampolis "Evaporated cane juice is pretty much just sugar. It is less processed so it retains trace vitamins and minerals but has the same amount of calories as sugar."¹

She goes on to talk about further benefits of not refining the sugar but I can tell you from experience that an ingredients label listing juice as opposed to sugar wasn't written with your health in mind. It was composed at an advertising or marketing agency with your health conscious, yet still a little lazy, buzz word skimming brain in mind.

Cane juice indeed.


1 Ask Dr. G., Glamour, 04/09