Sugar: How Much Is Too Much

Sugar is one of the few nutrition topics where people split into two camps: one treats it like poison, the other like an irrelevant detail. The truth is more boring — the amount and the context decide, not the word itself. Here are the numbers you can actually work with starting tomorrow.

What counts as sugar

When anyone sets a limit, they mean free (added) sugars: everything added to food and drink, plus honey, syrups and fruit juice. Sugar locked inside whole fruit, vegetables and milk does not count against that quota.

The difference is practical, not philosophical. A hundred grams of apple has about 10 g of sugar, but also 2.4 g of fibre and a lot of water — it takes three minutes to eat and it fills you up. A hundred millilitres of soft drink has 10–11 g of sugar with zero fibre, goes down in 20 seconds, and you barely notice it.

The actual numbers

The World Health Organization recommends keeping free sugars under 10% of daily energy, and ideally under 5%. Translated into food:

• At 2000 kcal: 50 g of sugar (10%) as the ceiling, 25 g (5%) as the target.
• At 2500 kcal: 62 g as the ceiling, 31 g as the target.
• At 3000 kcal (hard training day): 75 g as the ceiling, 37 g as the target.

One teaspoon of sugar is 4 g and 16 kcal. So a 25 g target is about 6 teaspoons total for the day — from all sources, not just what you stir into your coffee. For most recreational lifters training 3–4 times a week, a realistic and sustainable range is 25–40 g per day.

Where it hides

• 500 ml soft drink: 50–55 g (13 teaspoons) — the entire daily ceiling on its own
• 250 ml orange juice: 22–25 g
• A 100 g bar of milk chocolate: 50–55 g
• A 150 g pot of fruit yoghurt: 15–20 g, of which 8–12 g is added
• Three coffees a day with two teaspoons each: 24 g
• A protein or muesli bar: 15–25 g
• Two tablespoons of ketchup (30 g): 6–7 g
• 40 g of breakfast granola: 8–12 g

Add the yoghurt, three coffees and one bar and you are already at 50 g — with no cake, no soft drink, and the distinct feeling that you ate clean.

What too much sugar actually does

It does not make you diabetic overnight and it does not poison you. The problem is more mechanical than that:

• Calories without fullness. Half a litre of juice is 200–220 kcal your stomach barely registers. Two of those a day for a month is roughly 12,000 extra calories.
• Triglycerides and liver fat. A consistently high fructose intake (over 100 g a day, mostly from drinks and sweets) raises blood triglycerides and fat inside the liver.
• Teeth. Here frequency matters more than amount — five small hits are worse than one big one.
• Type 2 diabetes arrives indirectly, through excess weight and fat around the waist, not because the sugar molecule is uniquely evil.

Sugar does not make you fat because it is sugar. It makes you fat because 600 calories you never noticed are very easy to drink.

Sugar around training

If you lift for 45–75 minutes, you need no fast sugar during or immediately after. A normal meal 1.5–3 hours beforehand covers it.

• Sessions or runs longer than 90 minutes: 30–60 g of carbohydrate per hour during the effort makes sense.
• Two sessions in one day less than 6 hours apart: 1 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight right after the first.
• For everything else: your daily protein intake (1.6–2.2 g per kilogram) matters far more than sugar timing.

A four-week plan

1. Week 1 — measure, change nothing. For three days (two weekdays, one weekend day) write everything down and add up the grams off the labels. Most people are surprised.
2. Week 2 — liquids first. Swap two of your three sweet drinks for water or unsweetened tea. That is usually 40–60 g less per day with zero effort around food.
3. Week 3 — coffee and breakfast. Cut half a teaspoon from your coffee each week; in three weeks you are at zero and you never noticed. Move breakfast to 25–30 g of protein (eggs, plain yoghurt, cheese) instead of sweet cereal.
4. Week 4 — schedule dessert. Keep one or two deliberate desserts a week, full size, no guilt. Banning everything ends with a chocolate bar on Friday night.

On the label, read the of which sugars line and always convert it to the portion you actually eat, not to 100 g. Under 5 g per 100 g is low, over 22.5 g per 100 g is high.

When to see a doctor

Cutting sugar is a habit problem, but some signs are not:

• Constant thirst, getting up to urinate twice or more per night, unexplained loss of 5 kg or more, blurred vision, slow-healing cuts — ask for a fasting glucose and HbA1c.
• Waist over 94 cm (men) or 80 cm (women) plus diabetes in the family — get checked once a year, without waiting for symptoms.
• Shakiness, sweating and a foggy head 1–3 hours after meals, happening regularly — that is a case for an exam, not for self-treating with sweets.
• If you already take medication for blood sugar or blood pressure, do not swing your carbohydrate intake sharply without talking to your doctor first.

The short version

• Aim for 25–40 g of added sugar per day; the ceiling is 10% of calories (50 g on 2000 kcal).
• Drinks are the single biggest source — half a litre of juice eats the whole daily quota.
• Whole fruit and milk do not count against that quota; fibre and water change the story.
• For sessions under 75 minutes you need no sugar around training.
• Start with liquids, then coffee, then breakfast — one change per week, not all at once.