What 'No Added Sugar' Really Means on Food Labels
Pick up a jar of yoghurt that says 'no added sugar' and look at the ingredient list. You'll find a dozen ingredients you don't recognise. Agents, thickeners, sweeteners, compounds designed to taste like sugar without technically being sugar. The label is technically true. And entirely deceptive.
By Niall Kiddle, Founder, Organised
Reviewed by Pedro Rodrigues, Agronomist ·
5 min read
Makers of the Organised Daily blend, a grass-fed beef organ supplement from regenerative UK farms
That's how food labelling works. It's designed to be read by lawyers, not by humans trying to figure out if something is nutritious.
No added sugar is not the same as no sugar
'No added sugar' means they didn't pour table sugar into the mixture. It doesn't mean there's no sugar.1 It means they used a different form of sugar. Fruit juice concentrate. Honey. Malt extract. Dried fruit paste. All of these contain sugar. The body processes them as sugar. But they don't count as 'added sugar' under labelling laws.
The reason they do this is simple: the label 'no added sugar' sells. People buy it thinking it's healthier. The food company saves money by using cheaper sweetening agents. Everyone wins except the person eating the product.
A yoghurt with 'no added sugar' can contain as much total sugar as a yoghurt with added sugar. The only difference is the marketing.
No added sugar is a marketing claim, not a health claim. It means the company avoided table sugar, not that the product is low in sugar or good for your health.
The 56 names for sugar
The food industry uses dozens of names for sugar because they know people are trying to avoid it. If you saw a product with sugar as the first ingredient, you wouldn't buy it. But if that sugar is listed as 'evaporated cane juice' or 'crystalline fructose' or 'maltose', you might not recognise it as sugar.
Here are some of the names they use: sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, molasses, evaporated cane juice, cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, grape juice concentrate, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, rice syrup, date syrup, coconut nectar, jaggery, muscovado, turbinado, demerara.
And that's not counting the artificial sweeteners: aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, sorbitol, maltitol, xylitol. These don't contain sugar, but they activate sugar receptors in your body and drive hunger signals. They're not healthier. They're just a different mechanism for the same problem.
The reason there are so many names is that labelling laws require ingredients to be listed in order of weight.1 If you put 'sugar' as a single ingredient, it might be first, which looks bad. But if you split sugar between 'honey', 'cane juice', and 'malt extract', each one appears lower in the list and the product looks less sugary. Same total sugar. Different optics.
If you can't pronounce it, and it's not a vitamin or mineral, it's probably an attempt to hide sugar or improve the shelf life of a processed product.
What thickeners and agents actually do
Look at a 'no added sugar' yoghurt and you'll see: gelatin, carrageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, pectin, starch, or maltodextrin. These aren't food. They're agents designed to make the yoghurt taste and feel like it has sugar and fat when it actually doesn't.
Why? Because when you remove the sugar and fat that make food delicious, it becomes unappetising. A low-fat, low-sugar yoghurt would taste like sour custard. So manufacturers add thickeners to give it viscosity and mouth-feel. They add emulsifiers to make it feel creamy. They add flavour compounds to make it taste like fruit when it contains almost no actual fruit.
The result is a product that looks and tastes like food but is actually a carefully engineered mixture of agents designed to mimic the properties of real food.
Your body recognises real food. It doesn't know what to do with carrageenan or guar gum. These compounds can inflame the gut lining, disrupt the microbiota, and trigger immune responses.3 They're not banned because the food industry lobbied to have them declared 'generally recognised as safe'. But that designation means they haven't been shown to be acutely toxic, not that they're actually safe.
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Why reading labels isnt enough
Even if you read every label carefully, you can't escape the problem. Some of the worst offenders are foods you wouldn't expect to contain sugar. Bread. Pasta sauce. Bacon. Salad dressing. Breakfast cereals positioned as healthy. They all contain hidden sugar because it's cheap, it improves taste, and consumers have been primed to want it.
And the legal threshold for 'sugar free' is generally anything under 0.5 grams per 100 g.2 A product can contain sugar and still be labelled sugar-free as long as the serving size is small enough.
The serving sizes themselves are often unrealistic. A package of biscuits might list a single biscuit as the serving size. Nobody eats a single biscuit. But that's how they keep the sugar per serving low on the label.
Reading labels is necessary but insufficient. You also have to understand the tricks being used against you.
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How to find real food on a label
Ingredient count. Real food has fewer than five ingredients. If it has more than 10, it's a product, not food. Pass.
Ingredients you recognise. Can you pronounce everything on the ingredient list? Do you have all of those ingredients in your kitchen? If you can't, it's not real food.
No sugar in any form. If the ingredient list contains any form of sugar (by any of the 56 names), put it back. It's not worth the metabolic hit.
No seed oils. If the ingredients include soybean oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, or cottonseed oil, put it back. These destroy your metabolic health.
No thickeners or emulsifiers. If you see carrageenan, xanthan gum, guar gum, or anything that sounds like a chemistry experiment, it's not real food.
Real food doesn't need a label that requires decoding. If you can't understand the ingredient list without a biochemistry degree, it's not food. It's a product designed to look and taste like food.
Where to shop. Buy from places where the default is real food. Farm shops. Farmers' markets. Butchers. Fish markets. Specialist grocers. The perimeter of supermarkets, where the real food lives. Avoid the middle aisles where all the products are concentrated.
When in doubt. If the product wouldn't have existed 100 years ago, it probably shouldn't exist now. Your ancestors didn't have 'no added sugar' biscuits. They ate biscuits made with flour, butter, and sugar, and they ate them rarely. That's a better model than eating 'healthy' processed substitutes constantly.
The food industry gets richer every time you have to study a label. The solution isn't reading better. It's buying fewer things that come with labels at all.
References
- 1. UK Food Standards Agency. Packaging and labelling guidance.
- 2. European Commission. Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods. EUR-Lex.
- 3. Chassaing B et al. Dietary emulsifiers impact the mouse gut microbiota promoting colitis and metabolic syndrome. Nature. 2015;519(7541):92-6. PMID: 25731162.
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