By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD

For many years, if you wanted to know how much sugar was added to a food, you could look at the ingredient list on the product’s label and look at the Nutrition Facts label which would tell you the total amount of sugar in the food. This was problematic for several reasons. Some food manufacturers would use lots of different sources of sugar in a product – for example, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, molasses, and brown sugar all might be listed as ingredients. Since ingredients are listed in descending order of how much of each is in a product, if there are lots of sources of sugar, none of them might make it to the top of the list of ingredients. You might think the product mainly contains peanuts but if you added up all the sugar sources, total sugar might really be the most prominent ingredient. Secondly, back when the label only listed total sugar, a product that had unsweetened dried fruit would look like it had lots of sugar when really, that sugar was there naturally in the form of fruit. 

The new Nutrition Facts Label, required on all foods as of January 2021, tells the amount of added sugars that are in products. As the Food and Drug Administration says, “Added sugars include sugars that are added during the processing of foods (such as sucrose or dextrose), foods packaged as sweeteners (such as table sugar), sugars from syrups and honey, and sugars from concentrated fruit or vegetable juices. They do not include naturally occurring sugars that are found in [cow’s] milk, fruits, and vegetables.”

Recommendations call for limiting added sugar to 10% or less of total calories per day. That’s because these added sugars don’t much if anything for us nutritionally – they mainly supply calories. If you need 1600 calories a day, 160 calories or less should be from added sugar. Since sugars have 4 calories a gram, that means 40 grams or less of added sugar per day for someone who needs around 1600 calories a day.  There is no requirement for added sugars; the 10% of calories is an upper limit.

I was recently looking at some popular vegan ice creams and noted that they had 30 grams or more of added sugar in a serving. Knowing which foods have a lot of added sugar and having a perspective on what is a reasonable amount of added sugar for you can help you choose foods and decide how much of these foods you want to eat.