The Ingredient in Your Cup-a-Soup That Behaves Like a Super-Sugar
You already check for sugar. You flip the packet, scan the numbers, and feel reasonably confident about what you are putting in your body. The problem is that the food industry already knows you do that, and they have been using a different name for years.
Maltodextrin.
It shows up in Continental Cup-a-Soup, in Maggi sachets, and in dozens of products marketed as warm, savoury, quick-fix meals. It looks like a white powder. It reads on the label as a thickener or filler, tucked somewhere between “modified starch” and “natural flavours.”
What the label does not tell you is that maltodextrin has a glycemic index of 85 to 105, significantly higher than white table sugar, which sits at 65. Some studies have measured it as high as 135 depending on the source and processing method.
That is not a small gap. Sugar is already considered a high-GI food. Maltodextrin clears it by a wide margin.
The way it works in your body is this: maltodextrin is technically classified as a complex carbohydrate, which sounds reassuring. But it is so heavily processed that your digestive system breaks it down almost as fast as glucose.
The moment it hits your bloodstream, blood sugar climbs sharply, insulin follows to bring it back down, and the crash leaves you with spiked-then-dropped energy levels. That is the flat feeling most people notice around 3 PM: the irritability, the sudden pull toward something sweet or salty to correct the slump.
Why this matters
This matters because the products built around maltodextrin do not feel like they should cause this.
The Continental Creamy Chicken label lists wheat flour and starch early, alongside maltodextrin and glucose syrup. Maggi Creme of Chicken leads with corn starch and a creamer containing glucose syrup solids, then layers maltodextrin on top of that.
Wattie’s Very Special Creamy Tomato, to its credit, runs a cleaner list: tomatoes at 90%, cream, a maize thickener, and not much else. But most of the shelf is not the Wattie’s tomato. Most of the shelf is built around cheap thickeners designed to imitate a creamy texture without the cost of actual whole-food fats.
The creaminess you taste is not coming from anything that feeds you. It is an illusion produced by maltodextrin binding with water.
Why the fix is not just “eat less”
Fat slows blood sugar absorption. Protein does the same. Fibre extends the time your stomach takes to empty, which draws out the window of fullness and keeps the hunger hormone ghrelin suppressed for longer.
Research in the International Journal of Peptides found that protein induces the most sustained postprandial ghrelin suppression of any macronutrient, which is why a meal with real protein keeps you full in a way that a maltodextrin-thickened soup simply cannot replicate.
Standard cup-a-soups deliver almost none of these mechanisms. They provide calories, a temporary sensation of warmth, and a blood sugar trajectory that sets you up for the biscuit tin by mid-afternoon.
What a cleaner ingredient list actually looks like
Plantasy Foods Cuppa Soups are built differently. The Wild Mushroom contains coconut milk powder, whole cassava flour, nutritional yeast, mushroom at 14%, salt, parsley, and white pepper.
The Cheezy Broccoli leads with dried vegetables, including broccoli at 13%, spinach, onion, and cassava, then nutritional yeast, coconut milk powder, apple fibre, and corn fibre.
The Cock-a-Leekie uses nutritional yeast, coconut milk powder, tapioca, dried leek at 10%, dried celery, konjac powder, and dried parsley.
Across the range: no maltodextrin, no glucose syrup, and no modified starch used as a primary filler.
The fats in coconut milk powder slow carbohydrate absorption. The fibre from cassava, apple, and konjac slows gastric emptying. The B vitamins in nutritional yeast support energy conversion rather than leaving it to spike and crash.
The 14% mushroom content in the Wild Mushroom variety deserves a separate note. Mushrooms contain beta-glucans, a class of soluble fibre with documented effects on immunity and inflammation.
Three ways to use these soups beyond the mug
1. Cheezy Broccoli sauce
Mix the sachet with only 50ml of hot water instead of 200ml. The result is thick, umami-heavy, and works well over steamed cauliflower or konjac noodles.
2. Wild Mushroom tonic-style broth
Whisk into 200ml of hot water with half a teaspoon of freshly grated ginger and a pinch of black pepper. Add a teaspoon of MCT oil for extra satiety.
3. Cock-a-Leekie meal upgrade
Add a handful of baby spinach and a tablespoon of hemp or pumpkin seeds. The seeds add plant protein and fibre, making the soup more satisfying.
The label test
Pick up your current cup-a-soup packet. Read the first three ingredients. If maltodextrin, modified starch, or glucose syrup appears in that opening third, the creaminess you are tasting has no nutritional weight behind it.
The powder is doing cosmetic work, not functional work.
Plantasy Foods Cuppa Soups are available now at Natural Things. If the 3 PM crash has been a regular feature of your day, the ingredient list is a reasonable place to start looking for the reason.
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