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by saagarjha 238 days ago
You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.
1 comments

> You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.

Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.

It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.

Now take pure sugar, add a dash of mint essence and a little oil, dissolve in hot water then dry in a warm oven. Kendal mint cake.

Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.

Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.

You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.

The difference you’re tasting is primarily flavoring, not sugar density, so that’s not a great test. People can’t really tell the difference by taste between hard candy made of pure sugar and hard candy made of sugar plus cornstarch, especially when other flavors are added. But anyway, candy generally tastes insanely sweet and sugary to me. What is the point here? The fact that candy is mostly sugar and people say so predates TikTok by a bit… centuries? Isn’t candy defined as anything sweet where sugar is the primary ingredient?
You can literally read the nutrition facts for Nerds or Jolly Rancher lol
I literally don't have those in my country :) Based on labels I found online, seems "Jolly Rancher" is more or less 61% sugar of its total weight.
I'm not sure what you're looking at, the nutrition labels I see are like 17g sugar out of an 18g serving size
From https://www.myfooddiary.com/foods/143911/jolly-rancher-hard-... (maybe the wrong one?)

Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"

As far as my doctor's diet guidelines go, that'd be 'effectively 17g of "sugar"'.

I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.

Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...

(plus some other quick search results)

https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...

https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...

Ah yes I you're right, I was reading too quickly and read the carbs as sugar. That said having candies that are like 60-70% sugar is basically sugar in my book, especially since the rest is corn syrup.