What Is Dextrose?

And Why Is It In My Food?

Reading the back label of ingredients in many processed foods can often seem like reading a chemistry book. Food ingredients are, in essence, all chemicals. The type of chemicals we often worry about, though, are chemicals that are unnatural in food – the kind of ingredients made in a lab that are added to food for various reasons.

There are a multitude of these type of chemicals in our food – preservatives, binders, fillers, flavoring agents and artificial colors; many of these come labeled on the ingredients list as their chemical name.

Often though, even simple ingredients and compounds can hide under chemical names on a food label. Sodium chloride sounds like something that would be in a chemical weapon, but it is simply table salt. Niacin may sound like a pesticide, but it really just an important (and anti-fungal!) B vitamin.

There have been some questions about dextrose, and whether it is okay for people on the Kaufmann 1 Diet to eat products containing dextrose. So, what is dextrose?

You’ll remember from Chemistry 101 that the suffix “-ose” denotes sugar. The chemical names for sugar – glucose, sucrose, fructose – all of these are names for certain types of sugar.

Glucose and dextrose are, biochemically speaking, the same thing. Glucose is the name given to blood sugar, and dextrose is a type of sugar found in plants. The glucose found in corn is actually dextrose. In fact, everyone’s favorite enemy, High Fructose Corn Syrup, contains roughly half glucose (in the form of dextrose) and half fructose.

Knowing these things about dextrose, it would be wise to avoid anything containing dextrose while on a Kaufmann 1 diet. Dextrose is simply a sugar, derived from corn and other plants. One of the primary goals of the Kaufmann 1 Diet is to avoid sugar with the goal of starving any sort of fungal or yeast infection you may have in your body. Try avoiding anything with dextrose on the label.