Monitoring sugar in your dietSugar sources

Types of sugar

A picture of a man reading the food label on a soft drink bottle

Sugar can sneak into your diet without you realising

Sugar comes in many guises. Look out for these ingredients on labels, which are likely to indicate added sugars. While all these types contain a similar number of calories per gram, they vary in levels of sweetness.

Fructose Also look for fruit sugar and levulose
Glucose Also look for corn sugar and dextrose
Glucose syrup Also look for corn syrup
High-fructose glucose syrup Also look for high-fructose corn syrup, fructose-glucose syrup, glucose-fructose syrup and isoglucose
Honey
Invert sugar
Invert sugar syrup Also look for sugar syrup
Lactose Also look for milk sugar
Maltose
Molasses
Sucrose Also look for beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, granulated sugar, icing sugar and sugar
Sucrose syrup

Added sugar vs natural

Sugar is a type of carbohydrate and provides fuel for the body, but eating too much can be bad for you. Added sugars, known as non-milk extrinsic sugars (NMES), are more harmful to teeth and lack other useful nutrients. They can be found in cakes, biscuits, fizzy drinks, soups, cereals, tinned foods, pizzas and pasta sauces, for example.

These bars contain 73.5g carbohydrate per 100g

Sugars that occur naturally in foods like milk, fruit, vegetables and grains are locked into the structure and tend to be less harmful to teeth. Watch out for honey, though, which contains NMES.

Labelling confusion

Checking levels and types of sugar can be difficult. Nutritional labelling is voluntary, unless you make claims such as ‘low sugar’, and sugars aren’t always listed separately from carbohydrates.

Labels list ingredients in descending order of weight, but different types of sugar are listed separately and can add up.

On the label for Alpen raspberry with yogurt bars, glucose syrup is listed fourth, and sugar, milk lactose and dextrose are all lower down.

Snack-a-Jacks classic caramel have 28g of sugar per 100g.

Also, remember fruits and milk, for example, will be listed but not always the natural sugar they contain.

Some low-fat products are high in sugar.

We found Snack-a-Jacks classic caramel rice and corn snacks, which have less than 5 per cent fat but 28g of sugar per 100g.

Weight Watchers oat digestive biscuits are lower in saturated fat than McVitie’s digestives, but they contain 20.5g of sugar per 100g – almost 4 per cent more than the McVitie’s.

For more on the claims of 'light' foods, see our guide to slimming pills and diet foods.

Savoury surprises

This ready meal contains more sugar gram for gram than vanilla ice cream

You might be shocked to discover that your evening main course could contain more sugar gram for gram than your dessert.

When Which? scoured supermarket shelves, we found that savoury foods as well as treats were often high in sugar.

Meals such as Asda sticky chilli chicken and Tesco crispy beef with sweet chilli sauce contain more sugar gram for gram than vanilla ice cream.

Sugar is used as a preservative as well as a sweetener, but in these meals there is more than three times the amount per portion that the Food Standards Agency (FSA) says is high.