There’s a shocking amount of sugar in some popular foods

If shoppers were easily able to read how much sugar was foods they commonly bought, they’d be able to avoid up to 26 teaspoons of sugar a day, according to a new report.

There’s currently no requirement for food producers to make clear on food labelling the sugar content of the product, consumer advocate Choice says, and that’s something that it wants federal and state food and health ministers due to meet on April 28  to change, when the ministers get together for the  Forum of Food Regulation. 

At present, the food industry uses 43 difference words for added sugar when listing ingredients on packaged food, Choice said.  These words included glucose solids, corn syrup, panela, molasses and elderberry juice concentrate.

“At the moment, you have to be a food scientist to identify added sugar in processed foods,” Choice policy adviser Katinka Day said. “Consumers in Australia have no clear way to knowing how much sugar has been added to a food.”

As well as releasing its damning report into food labelling standards in Australia, Choice has asked consumers to sign up to a letter it plans to send to the ministers.

The letter says: “Food companies make it hard for us to identify added sugars in their products. As it stands, the Nutrition Information Panel doesn’t differentiate between added sugar content and sugars that naturally occur in the product. So the only way for me to find out is by identifying the 43 different names for sugar in the ingredients list. Added sugars should be clearly identified on food labels.”

Choice claimed that consumers would make different food choices if the wording on food labels made clear how sugar there was in some popular products, because that would prompt them to chose similar products with less sugar. 

For example, a small serving of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast cereal contained 2.7 teaspoons of sugar, Choice said, which could be avoided by swapping to Uncle Toby’s Weeties. Meanwhile, switching from Gippsland’s Raspberry and Coconut Yoghurt to the same brand’s Organic Natural Yoghurt, then adding your own raspberries and coconut would save shoppers 3.8 teaspoons of sugar, according to the Choice report.

The report sets out a day’s menu made up of five meals, pictured below, that shows that swapping one food popular product for another could help a person save as much as 26 teaspoons of sugar a day, or a whopping 38.3 kilograms a year.

It says the issue is key because half of the Australian population is eating more than the World Health Organisation’s recommended amount of sugar; the WHO says sugar intake should make up no more than 10 percent of an individuals total energy intake each day.

Do you scan the ingredients list of packaged foods?