Updated April 2026 · 8 min read
10 foods with more sugar than you’d expect
Sugar isn’t only where you’d expect it. The UK’s biggest per-capita sources of free sugar include a handful of foods that don’t taste particularly sweet, don’t advertise themselves as desserts, and sit on what looks like the “healthy” half of the supermarket. Here are ten of them — what the numbers actually look like, and a genuinely better swap for each.
Why ordinary foods turn out to be sugary
Three things drive the surprises. First, sugar is a cheap, shelf-stable preservative — it keeps sauces fresher for longer in a jar. Second, sugar balances acidity: anything with vinegar, citrus, or tomato needs something to round the edges, and sugar is the most reliable tool. Third, when manufacturers reformulate a product to cut fat, sugar is often what they add back to keep it tasty. “Low fat” and “high sugar” are closer companions than the front of the pack suggests.
The thresholds to keep in mind, from the UK’s front-of-pack traffic-light labelling: a food is “high” in sugar above 22.5g per 100g (or over 27g per portion), “low” below 5g per 100g, and “medium” in between. The daily free-sugar limit for a UK adult is 30g — about 7½ teaspoons. It takes surprisingly little to eat it all before dinner.
1. Shop-bought pasta sauce in a jar
Typical sugar: 6g to 14g per 100g. A standard 125g serving clears a teaspoon and a half of sugar; some “family-size” sauces double that.
Sugar in pasta sauce isn’t a flavour decision so much as a chemistry one — it balances the acid in tomatoes and makes a shelf-stable product taste like the long-simmered version you’d make at home. The difference between the lowest and highest sugar jars on a UK supermarket shelf is roughly a factor of four, all in broadly similar recipes.
Better swap: Home-made sauces are generous with tomatoes and sparing with sugar. A tin of chopped tomatoes, a splash of olive oil, garlic, and a pinch of salt, reduced down for 15 minutes, delivers under 4g of sugar per serving — all from the tomato itself. Freeze in portions. As a bonus, it will be cheaper than the shop-bought sauce.
2. Tinned tomato soup
Typical sugar: 3g to 6g per 100g — but standard tins are 400g. One tin contains 12g to 24g of sugar. Half a day’s allowance, in a lunch most people wouldn’t think of as sweet.
The same acid-balancing problem as the pasta sauce, at scale. Creamed versions add a little more again.
Better swap: Roast a tray of tomatoes, red peppers, and garlic, blitz with stock and a splash of milk. A 300ml serving sits under 6g of sugar from the vegetables alone. Homemade soup freezes beautifully.
3. Low-fat flavoured yoghurt
Typical sugar: 12g to 20g per 125g pot. A single fruit-flavoured pot can contain as much free sugar as a chocolate biscuit.
When fat is stripped out of yoghurt, it loses mouthfeel and the fruit flavours no longer carry. Sugar goes in to compensate — typically as sugar itself, but often also as fruit juice concentrate or honey. The kids’ “squeezy” yoghurt pouches are particularly sugar-heavy by weight.
Better swap: Plain natural or Greek yoghurt (around 4g sugar per 100g — all from lactose, which doesn’t count as free sugar) with fresh fruit stirred through it. Berries or a chopped peach add sweetness without crossing into the free-sugar column. For kids who want flavour, a teaspoon of good-quality jam on top is still a significant step down from a pre-sweetened pot.
4. Granola bars and “breakfast” biscuits
Typical sugar: 18g to 30g per 100g. Many single-serve bars sit at 8g to 14g per bar.
These products are glued together with sugar — honey, glucose syrup, date paste, or sugar itself is structurally doing the binding work. Without it, the oats and seeds fall apart. Marketing them as “breakfast” or “energy” foods makes you think that they sit in a different category from biscuits and sweets, but gram-for-gram the sugar content is often similar.
Better swap: Plain oatcakes with nut butter; a small handful of unsalted nuts plus a piece of fruit; or homemade flapjack made with half the usual sugar. Flapjack recipes tolerate a 50% sugar reduction surprisingly well if you add a mashed banana as the replacement binder.
5. Baked beans
Typical sugar: 4.5g to 6g per 100g. A half-tin (200g) portion contains 9g to 12g of sugar — a third of the adult daily limit, in what parents often treat as a default lunch.
The tomato sauce on the beans is the culprit, not the beans themselves. “Reduced sugar” versions cut this by roughly a third.
Better swap: Reduced-sugar baked beans genuinely work (they pass the 8-year-old taste test), and the sugar figure falls to around 3g per 100g. Or cook cannellini beans in a home-made tomato base — all the flavour, without the syrupy finish.
6. Shop-bought salad dressing
Typical sugar: 8g to 20g per 100g. A tablespoon of sweet chilli, honey-mustard, or balsamic glaze delivers 2g to 5g of sugar in one pour.
“Light” or “low-fat” dressings are usually worse. Stripped of oil, they need sugar to carry the flavour. The effect is that healthy-looking salads can arrive with as much sugar as a small pastry on top.
Better swap: Three parts olive oil, one part lemon juice or vinegar, a pinch of mustard, salt, pepper. Under 1g of sugar in the whole bowl. Home-made vinaigrette keeps for a fortnight in a jar in the fridge.
7. Flavoured plant milks and milkshakes
Typical sugar: 6g to 13g per 250ml. Chocolate-flavoured plant milks, sweetened almond, and ready-made milkshakes sit near the top of this range.
Unsweetened plant milks can contain as little as 0.1g per 250ml. The flavoured versions can be fifty times higher. The jump from plain to chocolate or strawberry is far larger than people expect.
Better swap: Unsweetened oat, almond, or cow’s milk. If your family wants chocolate milk, make it with plain cow’s milk and half a teaspoon of cocoa powder plus a very small amount of sugar or honey — you’ll use a fraction of the ready-made version.
8. Fruit smoothies
Typical sugar: 15g to 30g per 250ml. Shop-bought super-fruit smoothies can go higher again.
This is one of the more surprising entries. Whole fresh fruit is full of natural sugar bound up in fibre; your body processes it slowly. Blend it into a smoothie, and the sugar is liberated from the fibre matrix and lands in the bloodstream much faster. NHS guidance is explicit: smoothies and fruit juice count as free sugars from the moment the fruit is blended, and shouldn’t exceed 150ml per day.
Better swap: Whole fruit with a small drink of water or milk. If the convenience of a smoothie matters, dilute it with plain yoghurt or milk, use vegetables (spinach, kale) alongside the fruit, and cap the serving at 150ml.
9. Sweet-chilli and teriyaki stir-in sauces
Typical sugar: 25g to 55g per 100g. A 35g tablespoon of sweet chilli sauce delivers 10g to 18g of sugar — almost two teaspoons — in a serving most people wouldn’t measure.
These sauces are closer to a syrup than a savoury sauce by composition. Sweet-and-sour, teriyaki, plum, and hoisin all sit in the same territory. A mid-week stir-fry can become a dessert-level sugar event without any visible sugar on the plate.
Better swap: Make a simple stir-fry sauce with soy sauce, a small amount of honey, grated ginger, and a splash of rice vinegar. Total sugar per serving around 4g. You’ll use half as much because the saltiness carries the flavour instead of the sweetness.
10. Protein bars and “functional” snacks
Typical sugar: 10g to 25g per bar. The bars sold on the fitness-and-wellness aisle share a manufacturing challenge with granola bars: they have to hold together, taste acceptable, and survive a rucksack. Sugar (often in the form of honey, rice syrup, or date paste) solves all three problems at once.
Some newer products use sugar alcohols (erythritol, maltitol) or soluble fibre (chicory root) to replace sugar; the sugar column drops as a result. The evidence on whether this is a meaningful long-term improvement is still thin, particularly for children.
Better swap: Whole food does the job more cheaply. A hard-boiled egg, a banana, a handful of roasted chickpeas, or plain Greek yoghurt with nuts on top delivers the same protein or energy at a fraction of the sugar.
A day of ordinary meals — how the numbers add up
Imagine an unremarkable day in a UK family kitchen. A flavoured yoghurt and a granola bar for breakfast (14g + 9g = 23g of free sugar). A bowl of tinned tomato soup with a ham roll at lunch (16g). Stir-fried chicken with a jar of sweet-and-sour sauce for dinner (14g). A 250ml fruit smoothie after school (20g).
Total: 73g of free sugar. That’s more than double the adult daily limit of 30g, and nothing on the list is a dessert, a biscuit, or a bag of sweets. No-one in the story ate anything obviously sugary. The same day with the swaps above — plain yoghurt with fruit, homemade soup, stir-fry with soy-and-ginger sauce, a piece of fruit and a glass of milk — lands around 14g. The shift isn’t willpower; it’s a handful of different choices in the supermarket aisle.
The five-minute label rule
A single mental shortcut solves most of this: before putting anything in the trolley, glance at the “Carbohydrates — of which sugars” line on the back panel and compare it to the 5g-per-100g green traffic-light threshold. Anything under is fine. Anything between 5g and 15g is context-dependent (how big is the portion? how often will you eat it?). Anything above 15g per 100g that isn’t an actual dessert gets a second look.
For a fuller picture of how 30g of sugar stacks up across a day — in teaspoons, in cubes, and against the foods and drinks that deliver it — see our companion article: So, what does 30g of sugar actually look like?
Frequently asked questions
Is the sugar in fruit the same as added sugar?
The sugar inside whole fruit — held within the fibre matrix of an apple, an orange, a banana — is not counted as free sugar by the WHO or the NHS. Once the fruit is juiced, blended, dried, or pureed, the sugar is liberated from the fibre and counts as free sugar. That’s why whole fruit is always preferred to juice or smoothies, particularly for children.
Does reduced-sugar always mean low-sugar?
No. “Reduced sugar” is a regulated claim meaning the product contains at least 30% less sugar than the standard version of the same food. A reduced-sugar ketchup that starts at 25g per 100g falls to around 17g — still well above the “low” traffic-light threshold of 5g per 100g.
Are natural sweeteners like honey and date syrup healthier than sugar?
Both are classified as free sugars by the NHS and count against the daily limit in exactly the same way. They contain trace minerals that granulated sugar doesn’t, but in quantities too small to affect the overall picture. Treat them as sugar with a different flavour, not as a health food.
How much sugar is too much?
The NHS daily free-sugar limit is 30g for adults, 24g for 7–10 year olds, and 19g for 4–6 year olds. These are upper ceilings, not targets. Going under them is the goal; exceeding them regularly is where health concerns begin.
Is sugar in low-fat food worse than sugar in full-fat?
The sugar itself is chemically identical. But low-fat versions of common foods (yoghurts, dressings, biscuits) often contain more sugar than the full-fat equivalents to compensate for the lost flavour. The overall sugar intake from a diet built on “low-fat” processed foods can end up higher, not lower.
Sources: UK Food Standards Agency front-of-pack nutrition labelling; NHS Eatwell Guide and free-sugars guidance; Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition reports on carbohydrates and sweeteners; Action on Sugar surveys across product categories; British Nutrition Foundation; Public Health England sugar-reduction programme reports. Ranges are cross-checked against current UK retailer nutrition panels. Information only — not medical advice.
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