What are free sugars?

Free or added sugars are the sugars that are added to foods and drinks to sweeten them artificially along with the table sugar we are all familiar with.

Free or added sugars are extracted from the structure of a natural ingredient such as sugar cane or corn and then often processed to increase their sweetness,

What happens if I have too much?

Free sugar provides energy without other nutrients to balance it; this can leave us wanting more and more leading to weight gain. They are increasingly seen as a major contributory factor to the obesity epidemic in the West.

Type 2 diabetes is very much associated with excessive added sugar consumption and free sugars are now thought to contribute to a variety of disease states.

What’s high fructose corn syrup?

Typically one of the most used added sugars is high fructose corn syrup added to a myriad of foods and fizzy drinks. High fructose corn syrup is a processed sugar made from corn, a process that turns some of the natural glucose to fructose. The simple reason for this is that fructose is twice as sweet and glucose making the resulting syrup far sweeter than it would naturally be and closer to the sweetness of sucrose (table sugar), but much cheaper to produce.

The resulting syrup consists of roughly 42% fructose and 53% glucose produced unnaturally and not bonded together as you would find in fruit or table sugar. This lack of bonding is thought to create problems with absorption leading to the fructose being turned more readily to fat.

Government Advice

The UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) gives guidelines on how much free or added sugar we should be consuming per day of less than 5% of our total calorie intake. So for an average adult this would equate to approximately 25 grams of added sugar per day.

We have set the RDAs for children and adults using these SACN guidelines.

An important fact to keep in mind when reading nutrition labels is that 4 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon.