Decoding the Jargon, pt. i

I'm a label-reader. I stand in grocery stores and hold two similar-looking packages in my hands and study and compare and critique. And I always run into something, no matter how "natural" the product claims to be: ingredients that may as well be written in Chinese. Or gibberish. Because they are, to about 99 percent of the public.

Words that inspire mental images of lab coats and Bunsen burners in chemistry class my junior year of high school, words that I don't want to ingest.

But I do. We all do.

What are these?

So begins a series in my blog, a perhaps and hopefully coherent and followable trail through this mess of personal and journalistic anecdotes. Because I cannot be the only person who wonders what these things are. And wants to know, in layman's (lame-man's?) terms.

To begin, simply because it is the first one I have found on this bag of (organic baked) tortilla chips:

Maltodextrin*

Merriam-Webster, that nice motherly book of definitions, says that it is:

any of various carbohydrates derived from the partial hydrolysis of starch (as of corn or potatoes) and used in prepared foods especially as a filler and to enhance texture and flavor

Ah, yes. Right. Abstract, thank you.

More digging.

Looks like, you cook a starchy plant (usually corn because we live in the United States and corn invades everything), throw in some enzymes and/or acid (like they pre-digest it for you), and you get a very processed, white powdery substance.

Corn --> Cornstarch --> Maltodextrin

It is just a long chain of glucose (simple sugar) molecules, which makes it technically classifiable as a complex carbohydrate (i.e. the carbs found in fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc.) But, those chains are broken down into single glucose molecules in the body. So it is pretty much sugar once our bodies digest it, and has the same amount of calories (4 per gram), but it is not sweet.

And even though our body processes it as sugar, it is not listed under "sugar" on nutrition labels because it is "complex".  It will just show up under the general carbohydrate listing.

For this devious reason, maltodextrin is used a lot as a filler in foods looking to lower its sugar content and also in energy supplements looking to raise caloric levels without adding taste.

Whew, okay, let me just take a deep breath and cool down my brain, because I had to trudge through a lot of suspicious bullshit just to come up with that simple analysis. Curiously, there is not a lot of good info on the web about maltodextrin, at least that seems trustworthy. (I wondered, Should I go get a *gasp* book?) And a lot of it is contradictory.

For example, one article on a website for vitamin supplements says, "During the cooking process, ... natural enzymes and acids help to break down the starch even further." By not mentioning where those enzymes or acids come from, this gives the impression that they just appear, that they come from the food itself. But, I found on other sites words such as applied and used in reference to enzymes.

My intuition is that, much like its representation on the Internet, maltodextrin is a sneaky thing. It is natural in that it comes from a plant. But it only comes about from manipulation of that plant. And it tricks our bodies into thinking it's something it's not... or maybe it's the food industry that tricks us, by labeling it as "complex" when it really is more "simple."

My advice, especially if you are diabetic: watch out, treat it like sugar. Better yet, just use unrefined versions of sugar. At least those are sweet.



*Ironically, maltodextrin does not show up as a recognized word in Blogger's spellcheck. Go... figure.