The Live Wire



Press Release

Sweet little mystery

5 April 2007

Avoiding sugar may be harder than you think, says Which? It’s in all sorts of food, but it’s not always easy to tell from the labelling.

Which? found that savoury meals such as Asda sticky chilli chicken 1 and Tesco crispy beef with sweet chilli sauce 2 contain more sugar per gram than vanilla ice cream. The meals contain more than three times the amount per portion than the Food Standards Agency (FSA) says is high.3

The consumer organisation also found high levels of sugar in other products: Weight Watchers oat digestive biscuits (a low-fat food) contain 20.5g of sugar per 100g – almost 4 per cent more than McVitie’s digestives; Kellogg’s crunchy nut cornflakes contain 35g of sugar per 100g.

Checking for sugar on food labels can be confusing, however. It comes in many different forms: corn sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, glucose, glucose syrup, high-fructose glucose syrup, honey, invert sugar, invert sugar syrup, isoglucose, levulose, maltose, molasses, sucrose and sucrose syrup, among others. These can be listed separately and add up.

Labels list ingredients in descending order of weight. Petits Filous Plus drinks (popular with children) contain 13.1g of total sugars per 100g with sugar listed second and fructose listed fourth. An Alpen raspberry with yoghurt bar lists glucose syrup fourth, and sugar, milk lactose and dextrose lower down. Both these products contain natural and added sugars.

The labelling on the Alpen bar gives no details of specific sugar content.4 Surprisingly, labelling of sugar is voluntary, unless on a product claiming to be ‘low sugar’.

Neil Fowler, editor, Which?, said:

“It’s no wonder if people are baffled about the amount of sugar they’re consuming. Although many companies do voluntarily label their products, not all do.

“We support the FSA's front of pack traffic light labelling scheme, but manufacturers need to raise their game and put full nutrition information on the back of packs too.”



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