I've been trying to find out how many grams of sugar should a person limit themselves to a day?   What is reasonable?

Thanks for your info!

Whew!  When you ask a question, you really ask one, don't you! 

The desire for a sweet taste is a basic instinct we have.  It's easy, however, to let it take over to the point it damages our health.  We can train ourselves-- and our taste buds-- to do the right thing, though, if we understand what's right.

Disclaimer:  let me caution you that I am not a chemist nor a dietitian;  if any of you feel I'm misinformed about any part of this, please write and correct me.   

Here's some important points from a lay person, to explain sugar in the diet:

• There's not just one kind of sugar.  There's a large number of them.  In addition to sucrose and dextrose, the most common, there's fructose, maltose, lactose-- and more!  Anything with the last four letters "ose" is sugar. 
  
  
• Sugar is naturally found in many foods.  Milk has lactose.  Fruit has fructose.  Even most veggies have sugar.  In fact, most sugar and sugar products are produced from sugar cane (a kind of grass, more or less), sorghum (a grain),   sugar beets and corn. 
  
  
• "Pure" sugar comes in many forms.  In addition to the white crystal or powdered sweet stuff, we have brown sugar, molasses, corn syrup, maple syrup, sorghum-based syrup, honey and more. Very concentrated sources of sugar include jams, jellies, other syrups or toppings, candies and whipped toppings and fillings.
  
  
• Your body also breaks down starches (carbohydrates) into sugars as needed.    You must have sugar in your blood in order to function;  sugar, together with oxygen, are basic fuels that, like gas in your car,  keep your body running.   
  
  
• If you "flood your engine" with too much sugar, your body kicks in more insulin to "burn off" the sugar, mostly converting it to fat. 
  
  
• Persons with diabetes can no longer produce enough insulin to burn off sugar in the body, resulting in illness and even death as sugar clogs up the system.     Others kick in too much insulin when overdosed on sugar, burning up too much and causing low blood sugar, usually with fatigue and/or the shakes.    
  
  
• If you don't eat enough, long term, to keep your body fueled, it starts converting fat back into fuel.  Then when the fat is gone, it starts on muscle; this is not a good thing!
  

The body works best when it can extract small amounts of sugar from its food over a period of time.  Dietitians recommend you eat "complex carbohydrates".   Why?  One reason is that these are foods with starches that take more time for your body to break down and slowly extract the sugar and other nutrients.   For instance, white rice is digested very quickly;  brown rice takes a while and has extra vitamins, too.  Same for white refined flour versus whole wheat flour.    Other grains are more complex naturally, such as rye and buckwheat.   Same goes for veggies.  Spinach and other green and leafy vegetables have very little natural sugar and starch, while beets, corn, carrots and potatoes have quite a lot.

To complicate things:  if a mildly diabetic person eats a candy bar by itself, his or her blood sugar may immediately rise to unhealthy levels.   If that candy bar is eaten with, for instance, some beans, brown rice and a salad, digestion is slowed down and the blood sugar may stay in or near the normal range.  (This is not a recommendation, just an example of how things work.)

Here's some important guidelines:

• If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic, have been diagnosed with low blood sugar episodes, or are obese, you must avoid processed sugar and strictly control the amount of natural sugars and refined carbohydrates you take in, as your doctor or dietitian will have told you. 
  
  
• If you have relatives with adult-onset diabetes, had diabetes during a pregnancy or have other risk factors for developing diabetes, you are better off following the same rules for several reasons. Some researchers have speculated that too much sugar may stress, and can even "wear out", the body's insulin-producing capabilities, resulting in earlier onset of diabetes.  You will be better able to control your weight, and excess weight is a factor in diabetes.  In addition, you will have better eating habits, making diabetes, if you do get it, easier to control.
  
  
• If you don't have these problems and are using a little sugar to make nutritious foods nicer to eat, you're on the right track.   For instance, Brown Rice Pudding has a lot of nutrition;   white cake doesn't.   Plain gelatin dessert is mostly just colored sugar and water; gelatin dessert made with fruit juice and packed with real fruits has nutrition.  Spiced Iced Tea has antioxidants, vitamins and more- plus sugar; most soft drinks have artificial flavoring, artificial coloring, sodium (salt), and sugar.  See the difference?
      
• That said, for a healthy person, especially a young one, who brushes his or her teeth frequently, with normal  weight, with low risk factors for diabetes (but who knows, really?) and who eats lots of nutritious foods, there's probably no harm at all in eating some extra refined sugar.  The amount one eats, in that case, isn't the point. 

The problem with sugar is, first, the more one eats, the more one wants.  The tongue becomes trained to desire sweeter foods.   That's one reason manufacturers of prepared foods of every kind add sugar.   (Other reasons are to preserve the food, improve the overall flavor, and in breads and other yeast products, to make them rise.)   The average American diet, though, has gone too far in that direction.  See "Have you checked your food for sugar content?"   Almost every prepared food in the market contains some kind of added refined sugar. 

Second, refined sugars are empty calories.  We need many, many other nutrients; vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and more.   If we eat more sugars, we consume less of these other nutrients, increasing our risk of low energy, any number of illnesses and of becoming overweight.  

Habits are hard to break.  Very few parents would consider banning all processed sugar from healthy children's' diets.  As soon as the kids were out of sight, in any case, they'd probably pig out on sweets.  We all crave sweets.  So here's my recommendations for healthy people not at high risk for blood-sugar disorders:

• Don't buy sugar-coated cereals, "fruit" tarts and other ready made, sugar-laden products.  They have very little nutritional value in your diet, and set you up to crave more sugar.
  

• Check the contents.  Try to buy brands that have less added refined sugar.  Ingredients are listed in order of weight; you might be surprised at your conclusions when you first start to read labels!
  
  
• Make sweets count.  Add fruit to gelatin.  Have milk-based, low-fat puddings (see Double Rich Vanilla Pudding) and frozen desserts, or real fruit-juice frozen pops.   Substitute muffins or fruit-based sweet breads for refined cake. Look for recipes with whole wheat, added wheat or oat bran, wheat germ or ground flax seed.  Substitute real chocolate (usually cocoa)  for cheap "chocolate" desserts and sweets that contain little real chocolate (see Chocoholics Anonymous?).   Make those calories count for something:   see Power Foods.   
  
  
• Train your tongue (and those of your family) to need less sweets.  Do it little by little.  Put a tiny bit less sugar in your tea;  cut the amount of sugar in puddings.  Be careful about cutting sugar in baked goods as the sugar may be needed for consistency or texture.  Likewise in preserved foods;  sugar may be needed to retard spoilage.
  
  
• Avoid artificial sweeteners unless medically indicated.  If you need to avoid sugar that badly, you probably would  be better off not eating those foods you're putting the artificial sweeteners into.   There is a substitute, however, if you wish to sweeten naturally.  A liquid extract of a plant called Stevia is extremely sweet.   For whatever reason, the FDA has failed to approve it for sweetening, although it is used for that purpose in many other countries.  It can be sold as a food supplement, however, which falls under different rules.  Buy it at health food stores, or by mail from vitamin and supplement companies.  I get mine from Puritan.   It tastes almost like sugar but with a little aftertaste.  It's extremely concentrated.  I tend to use a tiny bit of sugar and a little Stevia in some foods like tea.  In yogurt or most cereals with milk, Stevia alone is fine as far as I'm concerned.    

So you see, Naomi, your question is really unanswerable.   The only questions I would ask are:

1. Would it be unhealthy for me to eat sugar at all?
   
   
2. Am I eating sugar instead of some healthy food?
   
   
3. When I eat something with sugar, is it a nutritious addition to my overall diet?   Or relatively empty calories?

Thanks, Naomi.  You really made me put on my thinking cap, too.

Jessica Setnick, MS, RD/LD...More on how much sugar

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (by the USDA and US Department of Health and Human Services) recommend eating refined sugars 'in moderation', which you addressed, meaning not as replacement for more nutritious foods, but in addition, if you have 'room' for them.

For those who prefer a more specific guideline, we (dietitians) generally recommend that refined sugars provide 10% or less of total daily energy intake (kcalories).  For example, someone who needs to eat about 2000 kcalories per day should be able to eat 1800 kcalories of more nutritious foods and still have 'room' for 200 kcalories of refined sugars per day (or 50 grams, since all carbohydrates provide 4 kcalories per gram).   This formula should not be used as a daily maximum, since everyone's daily intake of foods and nutrients varies, but it can be used as a guideline to see if over the course of a few days or a week you are usually close or way, way off.

You addressed the inherent difficulty in using food labels to calculate sugar intake - 'Sugars' on the label includes natural sugars such as those in milk and fruit in addition to the refined sugars, so an item like fruit yogurt or milk might appear to be relatively high in 'Sugars', even though refined sugars may be low - so beware of adding up all the 'Sugars' in your foods, as the total will likely be much higher than 10%.  If you are really intent on knowing how much refined sugar you are eating, I would recommend a computerized analysis of three or four days' worth of food records, since many food databases can separate out the different types of sugars.

Good grief!  I had no idea (although I should have) that there actually were guidelines to answer Naomi Karen's question on how much sugar one should eat. 

Thanks so much, Jessica, for correcting and informing me.  Of course, doing the calculations and analysis is a good bit of work, but probably well worth while for those with medical problems such as obesity or malnutrition, or for those in nursing homes or other institutions that need to be provided a medically sound diet planned by a dietitian.

For those individuals who have the time and patience and really want to know, I'd like to say I found some free links that would do this for you, but I haven't.  Most sites are university outpatient by appointment or dietitians, both of which charge a fee, or from doubtful sources with axes to grind such as supplement or diet food companies, or someone trying to sell a pseudo-medical book.  There's reasons for this;  it would be easy to take such a test, and although most of us know or can learn enough to make healthy, positive changes in our overall diets, we lack the knowledge to micro-manage our food intake and could end up doing more harm than good.  Only someone with specific training, such as a registered dietitian, can adequately interpret the results of such a test and make detailed, scientifically correct recommendations.

If you really feel you need to know if your diet is sound, perhaps you should consult with a dietitian.  Or possibly a reader knows a "do-it-yourself" non-commercial site that gives results in terms the average person can understand and act upon.  If so, please submit it.

Otherwise, for the rest of us, rules of thumb as previously suggested aren't a bad idea.  Ask yourself:

1. Would it be unhealthy for me to eat added refined sugar at all?
   
   
2. Am I eating refined sugar instead of some healthy food?
   
   
3. When I eat something with refined sugar, is it a nutritious addition to my overall diet?   Or relatively empty calories?

How much does one gram of sugar equal in teaspoons?"

Calculating from figures provided by The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, each teaspoon of sugar equals 2.65 grams.    Therefore 1 gram is a little more than a third of a teaspoon.  Since measuring spoons don't come that way, you can use either a very scant 1/2 teaspoon or a really heaping 1/4 teaspoon of sugar to approximate 1 gram.    A tablespoon of sugar is very close to 8 grams.

Other conversions and substitutions can be found at our Glossary page.

Hi, I'm writing an article for school on why we should have a juice machine and I'd like to find some more numbers on how many teaspoons of sugar are in different kinds of soda pop.   Any suggestions?

Do you have a listing of the sugar contents of various fruits? Am trying to locate this for a diabetic friend who does not have access to a computer.  Thanks for any assistance. 

All of the following may shed light on both Celia's and Cindy's questions.  First, an answer to Celia:

The sugar in the soft drinks is certainly a factor in the average diet.  But even more important are the sodium, artificial flavors and colors and the fact that these drinks are providing only empty calories.    Fruit juice also has sugar; but it has vitamins and those health-giving antioxidants.  See Healthy beverages?  Or drowning your money in trash drinks?

A teaspoon of sugar has about 16.25 calories (16 1/4) each.  Do the math; if a 12-oz. can of Classic Coke has 140 calories, one can assume it contains about 8 2/3 teaspoons or almost 3 tablespoons of sugar.  On the other hand, 12 ounces of orange juice is actually higher in calories, most of which are sugar, but it is loaded with vitamins, minerals and protective factors like antioxidants.  You can calculate soda pop as well as chocolate milk and juices by utilizing the easy-to-use USDA Nutrient Database.   

Dietitian Jessica Setnick sheds further light on my "seat of the pants" calculation for sugar content and has a healthy suggestion, too

It is slightly more accurate, and I think easier, to do the calculations using the grams of sugars listed on the label:  5 grams of sugar = 1 tsp.;  15 grams of sugar = 1 tablespoon.  Rather than calculating by calories, you don't have to "assume" anything, although you are right, all of the calories in soft drinks come from added (i.e. refined, not naturally occurring) sugar.

I would suggest that Celia ask the school to consider a bottled water dispenser, and to allow the kids to carry bottled water around with them all day (i.e. water only, not soft drinks).   

That's a great idea, Jessica, and since bottled water is in vogue-- perhaps somewhat of a status symbol-- the kids might be more likely to drink more water, less soft drinks, and make less trips to the drinking fountain!

Now for Cindy; your query is much more complex.  Diabetics cannot rely on amount of sugar in fruit or juices to calculate their dietary requirements.  Nor is it easy to figure out the sugar content of fruit or fruit juices, even utilizing the USDA Nutrient Database.   I'm asking Dietitian Jessica Setnick for further info on this matter.

In answer to your questions, the only way to calculate sugar would be if you knew how much total carbohydrates, starch, and fiber were in the food.  Then you could subtract starch and fiber grams from total carbohydrates  and the remainder would have to be sugars.  But I have a feeling that if the database doesn't give sugar it is not going to give starch amounts either.

A number of computer programs are available that provide the nutrient composition of foods, some that cost no more than $20 or so at a computer store.  Also, most of the online grocery stores show the entire food label so you can get  information that way if you own a computer have a  specific food in mind. 

There are diabetic exchange lists that are sometimes used by people with diabetes.  They break the food down into groups based on how much carbohydrate, fat, and  protein they provide.  The groups are meats (lean, very lean, medium fat and  high fat), dairy, fats, fruits, vegetables, and starches (bread, crackers, pasta, starchy vegetables, etc.).  A doctor or dietitian would help someone set up a meal plan with a certain number of "exchanges" from each group at each meal.  In some versions of the exchange plan, fruits, milks, and starches are all lumped into one group ("carbohydrates") because they all have a similar amount of carbohydrates.  It is total carbs that are counted in these systems, rather than breaking down into the sources of carbs.  Total carbohydrates have a more meaningful effect on blood glucose than just sugars.  

In other words, you can use the USDA site to estimate the sugar content of fruits and juices, but you are better off letting specialists (dietitians, doctors or books such as The New Family Cookbook for People With Diabetes) serve as a guide to your diabetic friend's eating habits.  Sorry about that!

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