Where the sugar in your day comes from

Most of us could name the obvious sources of sugar in a day: the biscuit with morning tea, the dessert, the spoonful in a coffee. The sugar that surprises people tends to be in drinks and in foods that do not taste especially sweet. This piece is about finding it, using the label on the back of the packet.

Two kinds of sugar, one line on the label

It helps to separate two ideas.

Sugars that come packaged with whole foods. The sugars inside a whole apple, a carrot or a glass of plain milk arrive with water, fibre, protein or other nutrients around them.

Added sugars, and what the World Health Organization calls free sugars. These are the sugars added to foods and drinks by a manufacturer, a cook or you at the table, plus the sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juice. The WHO’s 2015 guideline recommends keeping free sugars below 10 percent of total energy, and suggests that going below 5 percent, which it puts at roughly 25 g or about 6 teaspoons a day, would bring further benefit. The detail is in the WHO’s announcement of the guideline.

Here is the snag. The nutrition information panel on a New Zealand food label has one line called sugars, and it counts both kinds together. Food Standards Australia New Zealand’s guide to the panel spells this out, and notes that a product carrying a “no added sugar” claim can still be high in natural sugars. So the panel tells you how much sugar is in the food. To find out where it came from, you need the ingredient list as well.

The drinks that add up

Drinks are where sugar adds up fastest, because liquid goes down quickly and does not fill you up the way food does. The WHO notes that a single can of sugar-sweetened soft drink can hold up to 40 g of free sugars, around 10 teaspoons. Larger bottles hold proportionally more.

Other drinks worth a look on the label:

• Fruit juice and juice drinks. Even 100 percent juice counts as free sugar under the WHO definition.
• Iced teas, flavoured waters and sports drinks. Often sweeter than they taste, because acidity and cold hide sweetness.
• Flavoured milks and café drinks. A large flavoured latte or iced chocolate can carry a lot of added syrup on top of the milk’s own sugar.
• Energy drinks. Usually high in sugar unless labelled sugar-free.

The Health New Zealand eating well page puts it simply: water is the best drink, and plain milk and unsweetened tea and coffee are fine too.

Reading the per 100 g column

Every nutrition information panel shows two columns: an average quantity per serving and an average quantity per 100 g, or per 100 ml for a liquid. The serving size is chosen by the company and varies between products, so the per serving column is good for working out what you ate, and poor for comparing brands.

The per 100 g column is the one to use when you compare. FSANZ points out a handy trick: the numbers in that column work as percentages. If a cereal shows 25 g of sugars per 100 g, it is 25 percent sugar by weight.

For the per serving column, divide the grams of sugar by four to get a rough number of teaspoons. 11.3 g of sugars in a serve is just under 3 teaspoons. Then check the serving size against what you actually pour. If the panel says 45 g and your bowl holds 90 g, double it.

The ingredient list tells you where the sugar came from

Ingredients are listed in descending order by ingoing weight, so anything near the top of the list makes up a large share of the food. Sugar goes by many names on an ingredient list, and a product can include several of them, each further down the list than plain “sugar” would be on its own. Look out for:

• sugar, raw sugar, brown sugar, coconut sugar
• glucose, dextrose, fructose, maltose, sucrose
• glucose syrup, rice syrup, maple syrup, golden syrup, agave syrup
• honey, molasses, treacle
• fruit juice concentrate

Coconut sugar, honey and the various syrups are sometimes sold as better choices. In the kitchen they each have their own flavour, and that is a good reason to use them. On the label, they are still sugars, and under the WHO definition they all count as free sugars.

Where the rest of it hides

Sugar also turns up in foods that do not taste sweet. The WHO gives the example of a tablespoon of tomato sauce holding around 4 g of free sugars, about a teaspoon. Other common places are flavoured yoghurts, which Health New Zealand singles out, cereal bars, pasta sauces, salad dressings, marinades and many breads.

None of this means those foods are off the menu. It means it is worth reading the panel once or twice on the things you buy every week, then picking the version you like that has less, or making your own. A plain yoghurt with your own fruit, a homemade dressing of oil, vinegar and mustard, or a pasta sauce from a tin of tomatoes, garlic and a pinch of salt takes ten minutes and leaves you in charge of the sugar bowl.

A simple week of noticing

If you want to find where your own sugar comes from, try this for one week: read the sugars line on every packaged food and drink you have, convert it to teaspoons, and jot it down. Most people find that two or three habits, usually drinks, account for most of it. Change those, and the rest tends to look after itself.

General information only — not medical or dietary advice. For advice about your own diet, see your GP or a NZ-registered dietitian.