How Much Sugar a Day? The UK Free Sugars Guidance Explained
The UK guidance is that adults, and children from the age of 11, should have no more than 30g of free sugars a day. That is roughly seven sugar cubes. Younger children have lower limits: 24g for ages 7 to 10 and 19g for ages 4 to 6. The figure comes from the government’s advisers on nutrition, who recommended in 2015 that free sugars should make up no more than 5% of daily energy intake. The important word is “free”. The limit does not cover the sugar naturally present in whole fruit, vegetables or plain milk. It covers sugar added to food and drink, plus the sugar in honey, syrups, and fruit juices and smoothies.
That distinction is where most of the confusion lives, so it is worth taking slowly.
What counts as free sugar, and what does not
Free sugars are any sugars added to food or drink by a manufacturer, a cook or you, plus sugars that occur naturally in honey, syrups (maple, agave, golden), and unsweetened fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies. Juicing or blending breaks down the structure of the fruit and releases the sugar, which is why a glass of juice counts and an orange does not.
The NHS page on sugar in the diet sets this out clearly, and it is worth bookmarking. In short:
| Counts towards the 30g | Does not count |
|---|---|
| Table sugar in tea and coffee | Sugar in whole fruit, fresh or frozen |
| Honey, maple syrup, agave, golden syrup | Sugar in vegetables |
| Fruit juice and smoothies, even “no added sugar” | Lactose in plain milk and plain yoghurt |
| Sugar added to cereals, sauces, bread, flavoured yoghurt | Starchy carbohydrates such as rice, potatoes and pasta |
| Biscuits, cakes, sweets, soft drinks |
On juice and smoothies specifically, the NHS advice is to keep the combined total to no more than 150ml a day, which is a small glass, and to have it with a meal.
Why the label figure is not the same as free sugar
This catches out careful people. The “sugars” line on a UK nutrition label shows total sugars: free sugars plus the natural sugars from fruit and milk. A plain yoghurt might show 5g of sugars per 100g, almost all of it lactose, which does not count towards your limit. A fruit yoghurt with 12g per 100g contains that lactose plus several grams of added sugar, and you cannot tell the split from the label alone.
The way round it is the ingredients list. Ingredients are listed by weight, largest first. If sugar, or one of its aliases, appears near the top, a good share of the total is free sugar. Aliases to recognise include glucose syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, dextrose, sucrose, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate, honey, molasses and maltose. A product can list three or four of these separately, which pushes each one further down the list than the combined total would sit.
Front-of-pack colour coding helps with a quick scan. For sugars, a food is rated high when it contains more than 22.5g per 100g and low at 5g or less per 100g. Our guide to reading UK food labels goes through the traffic light system and portion sizes in more detail.
Where 30g goes in a normal day
Thirty grams sounds generous until you add up an ordinary working day. Nobody needs to weigh their food to understand the guidance, but it helps to see how quickly the grams arrive from things that do not feel like treats.
- Breakfast: a flavoured granola or a sweetened cereal, plus a small glass of orange juice. Juice alone is free sugar.
- Mid-morning: a flat white with a pump of syrup, or a cereal bar marketed as a healthy option.
- Lunch: a shop-bought sandwich and a bottled sauce or dressing. Sauces such as ketchup, sweet chilli and many salad dressings contain a surprising amount.
- Afternoon: two biscuits in a meeting.
- Evening: a cooking sauce from a jar, then a glass of something.
Any one of these is fine. Three or four together and you are past the limit without having eaten anything you would call a pudding. A single regular can of cola contains more than 30g on its own, which is why sugary drinks are the first place most people look.
Why the limit exists
The reasons the NHS gives are straightforward and well established. Free sugars add calories without much else, which makes it easier to eat more energy than you use and gain weight over time. They are also the main dietary cause of tooth decay, and the frequency of exposure matters as much as the amount: sipping a sweet drink across an afternoon keeps teeth bathed in sugar for hours.
From a training point of view, I would add one practical observation. Sweet foods and drinks are easy to overeat because they are rarely filling. Two hundred calories of fizzy drink does very little for your appetite; two hundred calories of eggs and toast does a lot. That is the mechanism that matters for most people trying to lose fat, and it is why I talk about sugar in terms of what it displaces rather than as something toxic. Our explainer on what a calorie deficit actually is covers the bigger picture.
How to bring your intake down without making it a project
You do not need to cut sugar out. You need to find the two or three habits that account for most of it and change those. In my experience the order below catches the majority of it.
- Drinks first. Soft drinks, juices, smoothies, sweetened coffees and energy drinks. Swap to water, sparkling water, tea and coffee without syrup, or diet versions if you prefer them. Our post on sweeteners and diet drinks covers that question calmly.
- Breakfast second. Compare cereals per 100g and choose ones in the low or medium range, or move to oats, eggs or plain yoghurt with fruit.
- Sauces and ready meals third. These are where hidden sugar sits. Check the ingredients of the two or three you buy most.
- Gradual reduction in tea and coffee. Halve the sugar for two weeks, then halve it again. Taste adjusts more quickly than most people expect.
- Keep the treats you actually enjoy. A dessert you look forward to on a Saturday is a better use of the allowance than biscuits you did not notice eating.
Common mistakes
Treating honey and “natural” syrups as a free pass
Honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar and agave all count as free sugars. They may taste different and cost more, but the body treats the sugar in them much as it treats table sugar.
Cutting fruit
Whole fruit does not count towards the limit and comes with fibre and water. Cutting apples to make room for a granola bar is the wrong way round.
Assuming “no added sugar” means low sugar
A smoothie can honestly claim no added sugar and still count fully towards your free sugars, because the fruit sugar was released by blending.
Swapping sugar for an equivalent amount of something else
Low-sugar products sometimes make up for it with extra fat. Check the calories as well as the sugars line if fat loss is your goal.
Sugar and training
There is one context where sugar has a reasonable place: long or very hard endurance sessions, where quickly digested carbohydrate can help. For the kind of training most of my clients do, a strength session of around an hour, there is no need for a sugary sports drink. Water and a normal meal beforehand are enough. If you are training in the studio on private 1-1 sessions with me, we usually look at food habits early on, because a few small changes to drinks and snacks often do more than another workout would. How sessions are structured, and what they cost, is set out on the personal training page.
If you have diabetes or another condition affected by sugar intake, check with your GP or diabetes team before changing your diet, as the general guidance may need adjusting for you.
Questions we get asked
Is 30g of sugar a day a target?
No. It is a maximum for free sugars. There is no need to reach it, and many people eat well below it without noticing.
Does the sugar in milk count?
The lactose in plain milk and plain yoghurt does not count. Sugar added to flavoured milk or flavoured yoghurt does.
How many grams are in a teaspoon of sugar?
Roughly 4g, so 30g is a little over seven level teaspoons.
Is brown sugar better than white?
Not in any meaningful way. Both count as free sugars and have almost the same calories.
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