How much sugar per 100 g is too much?

As a working rule: above 10 g of added sugar per 100 ga packaged food is high in sugar, a threshold drawn from ICMR-NIN's dietary guidance. Below about 5 g per 100 g of total sugars, a food is genuinely low in sugar. Between the two, the answer depends on how much of it you eat and what else is in the pack.

Two numbers on the label are involved and they are not the same. Total sugars counts everything, including sugar naturally present in milk or fruit. Added sugars counts what was put in. A plain dahi is meaningful on the first and near zero on the second; a fruit drink can be the reverse of what you expect.

Total sugars and added sugars

Indian labels increasingly declare both. Where only total is printed, the ingredient list tells you the rest: if sugar, syrup, jaggery or a concentrate appears near the front, the total is mostly added.

The distinction matters because the two are useful for different things. Total sugars is what a scoring rubric should read, because it is what the underlying calibration was built on and because the body does not check the ingredient list. Added sugars is what a claim should be judged against, because that is what a manufacturer controls.

This is why LabelSaaf reads total sugars into the score and uses added sugars separately for the high-in-sugar flag. Scoring on added sugar alone would let a juice at 9 g total and 0 g added score as though it were water.

What the numbers look like

Total sugars per 100 g, from labels we have read, described by category rather than named.

The drink powders are the ones worth pausing on. At 32 to 46 g per 100 g, roughly a third to a half of the powder is sugar, and these are the products most often bought specifically for children.

The daily picture

Guidance in India puts added sugar at under about 10% of daily energy, which for most adults is roughly 50 g a day and closer to 25 g if you want to be careful. That sounds generous until you total a day: two cups of a sweetened drink, a few biscuits and one soft drink can reach it before any meal is counted.

The reason the per-100 g threshold is more useful than the daily one is that you can apply it standing in the aisle. You will not total your day at the shelf; you can look at one number and know whether the pack is a sugar product.

Sugar under other names

The ingredient list may not say sugar. All of these are sugars or behave like them:

• Syrups and concentrates: glucose syrup, corn syrup, invert syrup, fruit juice concentrate, honey.
• Traditional sweeteners: jaggery, gur, cane sugar, coconut sugar. Nutritionally these are sugar; the mineral content is negligible at the quantities used.
• Maltodextrin: technically not a sugar and therefore not always counted as one, but with a glycaemic index around 110 it behaves like one or worse. It is common in products marketed as sugar-free.
• Polyols: maltitol, sorbitol, xylitol. Lower in energy and slower, but not free, and in quantity they cause digestive trouble.

This is why a "no added sugar" claim is worth so little on its own. What each claim actually permits.

How sugar moves a LabelSaaf score

Sugar is scored on a fifteen-point ladder read from total sugars per 100 g. The first rung is 3.4 g and the steps are roughly 3 to 4 g apart up to 51 g, above which a pack takes the maximum. A pack at 46 g is therefore near the top of the penalty, and no amount of protein will offset it.

Separately, above 10 g of addedsugar per 100 g the verdict carries a high-in-sugar flag naming the figure. The flag is a statement of fact off the label, not an extra penalty. The full method.

Common questions

Is jaggery better than sugar?

Not in any way the label will show. It carries trace minerals, at quantities that do not change the nutritional picture, and it counts as added sugar. A pack sweetened with jaggery and one sweetened with sugar score the same.

What about fruit sugar in a juice?

It counts in total sugars and the score reads it. Whole fruit brings fibre that changes how quickly the sugar arrives; juice largely does not, which is why a juice and a soft drink can land closer together than expected.

Does 'sugar-free' mean zero?

It usually means below a small legal threshold, and it says nothing about maltodextrin, polyols or the fat and refined flour that often replace sugar in the recipe. Read the table, not the front.

Figures on this page come from labels we have read and hand-checked. Products are described by category rather than named, and no affiliation with or endorsement by any brand is implied.

Last checked: 2026-09-02

Photograph the nutrition table on a pack and get a score out of 100, with the reason behind every point.