How Much Sugar Is Too Much? A Practical Answer

Sugar attracts more absolutism than almost any other nutrient. It is not poison, and it is not harmless. Both extremes get in the way of the more useful question, which is how much, in what form, and instead of what.

The numbers

The American Heart Association recommends no more than 25 g of added sugar a day for women and 36 g for men, roughly six and nine teaspoons. The WHO recommends keeping added sugars below 10% of daily energy, with additional benefit below 5%.

Average US intake sits around 68 g a day, roughly 17 teaspoons. Most people are at two to three times the recommendation without eating anything they would identify as dessert.

The recommendations concern added sugar. The sugar in whole fruit comes with fiber, water and volume, arrives more slowly, and is not the thing anyone needs to worry about. Nobody developed a metabolic problem from eating apples.

Liquid sugar is the outlier

If you change one thing, change this. Sugar-sweetened drinks have the strongest and most consistent evidence linking them to weight gain and metabolic disease of any single dietary component.

The reason is that liquid calories barely register on your appetite. Eat 250 calories of food and you compensate by eating less later. Drink 250 calories and the compensation is minimal: the calories are largely additive. A daily soft drink is a few hundred calories a day that your appetite regulation never accounts for.

Fruit juice behaves much the same way. It is nutritionally better than a soft drink, and it is still liquid sugar without the fiber.

What fructose does that glucose does not

Table sugar is half glucose, half fructose. Glucose is metabolized throughout the body; fructose is handled almost entirely by the liver.

In moderate amounts, from fruit, this is unremarkable. In large amounts, particularly in liquid form, the liver converts the excess to fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis. This is the mechanism behind the association between high sugar intake and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is now very common and frequently undiagnosed.

The dose is what matters here. The fructose in two pieces of fruit and the fructose in a liter of soft drink are the same molecule arriving in entirely different quantities and at entirely different speeds.

Where it hides

Most people’s added sugar is not in obvious candy. It is in:

Flavored yogurt: often 15 to 20 g per pot, comparable to a dessert.
Granola and breakfast cereal: including the ones with mountains on the packaging.
Sauces: ketchup, barbecue sauce, pasta sauce, sweet chili, teriyaki. Jarred pasta sauce is a common surprise.
Bread: particularly sliced sandwich bread.
“Health” bars: frequently a chocolate bar with added protein and a better font.
Coffee shop drinks: a flavored latte can exceed an entire day’s recommendation.

Reading the label

US nutrition labels now separate added sugars from total sugars, which removed most of the guesswork. Use that line.

In the ingredients list, remember that sugar appears under many names: cane juice, invert sugar, maltose, dextrose, rice syrup, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrate. Splitting sugar across several of these keeps each one lower in the weight-ordered list. Agave in particular is marketed as a health food and is higher in fructose than table sugar.

What actually works

Deal with drinks first. Nothing else on this list comes close.
Buy plain and add your own. Plain yogurt with fruit; plain oats with whatever you like. You will use a fraction of what a manufacturer would.
Check the three or four packaged items you eat most. Sauces and cereals are usually where the volume is.
Do not fear whole fruit. It is not the problem and it displaces things that are.
Eat enough protein and fiber. Sugar cravings are frequently a symptom of meals that were not satisfying.

Some added sugar in an otherwise decent diet is entirely fine. The target is not zero. It is not being at three times the recommendation without realizing it.