Sugars

Sugars occur naturally in foods such as fruit and milk, but we don’t need to cut down on these types of sugars.

Sugars are also added to a wide range of foods, such as sweets, cakes, biscuits, chocolate, and some fizzy drinks and juice drinks. These are the sugary foods that we should cut down on.

Evidence from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey shows that most adults and children eat more sugar than is recommended as part of a healthy balanced diet.

Many foods that contain added sugars also contain lots of calories, so eating these foods often can contribute to you becoming overweight.

Food and drinks that have a lot of added sugars contain calories, but often have few other nutrients. To eat a healthy, balanced diet, we should eat these types of foods only occasionally, and get the majority of our calories from other kinds of foods such as starchy foods and fruits and vegetables. Learn more in A balanced diet.

Sugary foods and drinks can also cause tooth decay, especially if you eat them between meals. The longer the sugary food is in contact with the teeth, the more damage it can cause.

The sugars found naturally in whole fruit are less likely to cause tooth decay, because the sugars are contained within the structure of the fruit. But when fruit is juiced or blended the sugars are released. Once released these sugars can damage teeth, especially if fruit juice is drunk frequently.

Fruit juice is still a healthy choice, and counts as one of your recommended daily five portions of fruit and vegetables. But it is best to drink fruit juice at mealtimes in order to minimise damage to your teeth.

For a healthy, balanced diet, cut down on foods and drinks containing added sugars.

These tips can help you cut down:

• Instead of sugary fizzy drinks and juice drinks, go for water or unsweetened fruit juice (remember to dilute these for children, to further reduce the sugar).
• If you like fizzy drinks, try diluting fruit juice with sparkling water.
• Swap cakes or biscuits for a currant bun, scone or some malt loaf with low-fat spread.
• If you take sugar in hot drinks, or add sugar to your breakfast cereal, gradually reduce the amount until you can cut it out altogether.
• Rather than spreading jam, marmalade, syrup, treacle or honey on your toast, try a low-fat spread, sliced banana or low-fat cream cheese instead.
• Check nutrition labels to help you pick the foods with less added sugar, or go for the low-sugar version.
• Try halving the sugar you use in your recipes. It works for most things except jam, meringues and ice cream.
• Choose tins of fruit in juice rather than syrup.
• Choose wholegrain breakfast cereals, but not those coated with sugar or honey.

Nutrition labels often tell you how much sugar a food contains. You can compare labels, and choose foods that are lower in sugar.

Look for the 'Carbohydrates (of which sugars)' figure in the nutrition label.

• 'High: over 15g of total sugars per 100g
• 'Low: 5g of total sugars or less per 100g

If the amount of sugars per 100g is between these figures, then that is a medium level of sugars.

The sugars figure in the nutrition label is the total amount of sugars in the food. It includes sugars from fruit and milk, as well as the sugars that have been added.

A food containing lots of fruit or milk will be a healthier choice than one that contains lots of added sugars, even if the two products contain the same total amount of sugars. You can tell if the food contains lots of added sugars by checking the ingredients list (see below).

Sometimes you will see a figure for 'Carbohydrates', and not for 'Carbohydrates (of which sugars)'.

The 'Carbohydrates' figure will also include starchy carbohydrates, so you can’t use it to work out the sugar content. In this case, check the ingredients list to see if the food is high in added sugars.

Labels on the front of packaging
There are labels containing nutritional information on the front of some food packaging.

This includes traffic light labelling, and advice on Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs) of some nutrients, which can include sugar.

Traffic light labelling allows you to see at-a-glance if the food is high, medium or low in sugars.

• Red = High
• Amber = Medium
• Green = Low

Some labels on the front of packaging will display the amount of sugar in the food as a proportion of the Guideline Daily Amount (GDA). GDAs are guidelines about the approximate amount of particular nutrients required for a healthy diet. For more, see Food labels.

Ingredients list
You can get an idea of whether a food is high in added sugars by looking at the ingredients list.
Added sugars must be included in the ingredients list, which always starts with the biggest ingredient.
This means that if you see sugar near the top of the list, you know the food is likely to be high in added sugars.

Watch out for other words that are used to describe added sugars, such as sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, hydrolysed starch and invert sugar, corn syrup and honey.

For more on other food label terms, such as ‘no added sugar’, see Food labelling terms.