Added sugars are any sugars that were put into a food during processing or packaging, as opposed to sugars that exist naturally in the ingredients. The FDA defines them as sugars added during manufacturing (like sucrose or dextrose), sugars from syrups and honey, and sugars from concentrated fruit or vegetable juices. On today’s Nutrition Facts label, added sugars appear on their own line directly beneath “Total Sugars,” with a Percent Daily Value to help you gauge how much of your daily budget a single serving uses up.
How Added Sugars Differ From Natural Sugars
A glass of plain milk contains sugar (lactose), and a whole apple contains sugar (fructose), but neither of those show up in the “Added Sugars” line. Those are naturally occurring sugars that come packaged with fiber, vitamins, minerals, and protein. Added sugars, by contrast, are introduced during production. The sugar stirred into flavored yogurt counts. The sugar already present in the milk used to make that yogurt does not.
This distinction matters because naturally occurring sugars in whole foods come with nutrients that slow digestion and deliver real nutritional value. Added sugars contribute calories without those benefits, making it easier to exceed your calorie needs without meeting your vitamin and mineral requirements. That’s the core reason the FDA added this separate line to the label: consuming too much added sugar makes it difficult to eat a nutritionally adequate diet while staying within calorie limits.
Where to Find It on the Label
On the current Nutrition Facts panel, look below the bold “Total Sugars” row. Indented beneath it, you’ll see “Includes Xg Added Sugars” with a Percent Daily Value (% DV) on the right side. The Daily Value for added sugars is 50 grams per day, based on a 2,000-calorie diet. So if a product lists 12 grams of added sugars, that’s 24% of your daily value in one serving.
A quick way to visualize grams of sugar: four grams equals roughly one teaspoon. A product with 20 grams of added sugars per serving contains about five teaspoons of added sugar. That conversion makes it much easier to picture what you’re actually consuming.
Why Labels Changed
Before 2016, food labels listed only “Sugars” as a single number, lumping natural and added sugars together. A container of fruit yogurt might show 19 grams of sugar with no way to tell how much came from the milk and fruit versus the sweetener the manufacturer stirred in. The FDA updated the Nutrition Facts format because the scientific evidence behind both the 2015-2020 and the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans supported reducing calories from added sugars specifically. The new label design was meant to give consumers a clear, usable number for making that reduction.
How Much Is Too Much
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that people aged 2 and older keep added sugars below 10% of total daily calories. On a 2,000-calorie diet, that’s 200 calories, or 50 grams (about 12 teaspoons). That 50-gram figure is what the % Daily Value on the label is based on. A scientific advisory committee actually suggested that less than 6% of calories from added sugars would be more consistent with a nutritionally complete diet, but the official guideline stayed at the 10% threshold.
For context, a single 12-ounce can of regular soda typically contains around 39 grams of added sugar, which is 78% of the Daily Value in one drink. Sweetened cereals, flavored coffee drinks, granola bars, and condiments like barbecue sauce or ketchup can add up quickly even when individual servings seem modest.
Why It Matters for Your Health
Consuming too many added sugars contributes to weight gain and obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. The mechanism is straightforward: added sugars are calorie-dense but nutritionally empty. When a large share of your calories comes from sugar, you either eat more total calories than you need or you crowd out the nutrient-rich foods your body requires. Over years, both paths lead to the same chronic conditions.
Spotting Added Sugars in Ingredient Lists
Manufacturers don’t always call sugar “sugar.” The ingredient list on a package can use dozens of alternative names, and recognizing them helps you evaluate products that might look healthy at first glance. Common ones to watch for include:
- Sugars by name: cane sugar, confectioner’s sugar, turbinado sugar
- Syrups: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, rice syrup
- Other sweeteners: molasses, caramel, honey, agave
- Juice concentrates: listed simply as “juice” or “fruit juice concentrate”
- Ingredients ending in “-ose”: glucose, fructose, maltose, dextrose, sucrose
Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, so if one of these names appears in the first three or four positions, sugar is a major component of that product. Some manufacturers split sweeteners across multiple types (using both corn syrup and cane sugar, for example) so that no single sugar lands at the top of the list. Checking the Added Sugars line on the Nutrition Facts panel catches this tactic regardless of how the ingredients are labeled.
Special Rules for Honey and Maple Syrup
Single-ingredient sweeteners like pure honey and pure maple syrup follow a slightly different labeling rule. Because these products are the sugar (there’s nothing “added” in the usual sense), their labels are not required to include the phrase “Includes Xg Added Sugars.” However, they must still display the Percent Daily Value for added sugars, often accompanied by a small dagger symbol (†) that leads to a footnote explaining how much sugar from one serving contributes to your daily intake. The reasoning is simple: when you spoon honey into tea, it functions as added sugar in your diet even though the honey jar itself contains nothing artificial.
Practical Ways to Use the Label
The % Daily Value is the fastest tool for comparison shopping. As a general rule, 5% DV or less per serving is considered low, and 20% DV or more is considered high. When you’re choosing between two brands of the same product, like pasta sauce or breakfast cereal, comparing the added sugars %DV tells you more than the marketing on the front of the box.
Pay attention to serving sizes, too. A label might show a reasonable-looking 8 grams of added sugar per serving, but if the serving size is half a cup and you typically eat two cups, you’re actually getting 32 grams. Multiplying the listed grams by the number of servings you actually eat gives you the real figure. Dividing that number by four converts it to teaspoons, which is often the reality check that changes habits.