The No-Sugar-Added™ │ Low-Sugar-Added™ Revolution

Over the last 10 years, it has become increasingly obvious that consuming excess sugar—any kind of sugar—is bad for you. Excess sugar consumption has been associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, tooth decay, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and a lot more. Read more here...

Now that we have this realization, it is time for us to stop eating so much sugar. That is not easy because many of the foods we eat every day have sugar added. Thus, we are all used to everything being sweet. Our taste buds have adjusted to this excess sugar in our food, which is not natural. We are all addicted to sugar without knowing it. We need a new paradigm for food. We need a new paradigm of what is sweet.

Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recognized the problem of consuming excess sugar. Thus, it has changed the Nutrition Facts label(1) to include a line for added sugars. See FDA new Nutrition Facts Label.

To go along with the FDA’s new label, two new logos have been developed that do the following:

  • Allow food producers to highlight that their products have little or no sugar added.
  • Allow consumers to readily identify which products have little or no sugar added.

These logos provide a distinctive and easily recognizable image that allows consumers to know, at a glance, that the product is low in sugar and has a low glycemic load.

With these new logos to help us, we can all join the No-Sugar-Added™ │ Low-Sugar-Added™ Revolution!

The No-Sugar-Added™ │ Low-Sugar-Added™ Revolution Label  
Products that bear this seal have been verified to have No Sugar Added, with a total sugar content of 10 grams or less, and to have a Low Glycemic Load, of 10 units or less per serving.  
  The No-Sugar-Added™ │ Low-Sugar-Added™ Revolution Label
  Products that bear this seal have been verified to have Low Sugar Added, with a total sugar content of 10 grams or less, and to have a Low Glycemic Load, of 10 units or less per serving.

Total Sugar: It has been suggested that adults who eat 2000 calories of food per day should consume no more than about 80 grams(2) total of sugar per day. This sum includes both intrinsic and added sugars. Eighty grams amounts to about 320 calories or about 16 percent of calories from sugar total.

To put that into perspective, one 12 oz can of Coke® contains 39 grams of sugar, while a regular sized Snickers® Bar contains 27 grams of sugar.

Added Sugar: “Added Sugar” is sugar in any form that: (1) is not intrinsic to the ingredients of the product, which provide real nutritional value rather than just empty calories and (2) is added for the purpose of making the product “taste better” by making it sweeter.

The FDA suggests that adults should limit added sugar to less than 10 percent of calorie intake. Thus, if you eat 2,000 calories per day, your goal is to eat less than 200 calories (50 grams) of added sugar. The American Heart Association is even stricter: It recommends women consume no more than 100 calories (24 grams) of added sugar per day and that men consume no more than 150 calories (36 grams) of added sugar per day.

Glycemic Load: “Glycemic Load” (GL) provides a relative indication of how much one serving of the product is likely to increase the blood sugar levels.(3,4)

Glycemic load estimates the impact of carbohydrate consumption using the glycemic index (GI) while taking into account the amount of carbohydrate that is consumed. GL is a GI-weighted measure of carbohydrate content. For instance, watermelon has a high GI, but a typical serving of watermelon does not contain much carbohydrate, so the glycemic load of eating it is low. Whereas glycemic index is defined for each type of food, glycemic load can be calculated for any size serving of a food, an entire meal, or an entire day's meals. It has been suggested that adults who eat 2000 calories per day should consume foods that contain no more than about 100 units of glycemic load per day. For one serving of a food, a GL greater than 20 units is considered to be high; a GL of 11–19 units is considered to be medium; and a GL of 10 units or less is considered to be low.


1This new label will be required beginning on July 26, 2018. However, as new products become available, food producers will begin to use the new label.
2Some authorities suggest up to a maximum of 100 grams total of sugar per day.
3For a discussion of Glycemic Load, refer to http://nutritiondata.self.com/help/estimated-glycemic-load
4For a discussion of Glycemic Index, refer to http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/glycemic-index