How To Calculate Added Sugar

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that people “Consume less than 10 percent of calories per day from added sugars.”  This recommendation can be hard for people to apply in their daily lives.  Most of us struggle with calculating our total calorie intake and then what 10% of that number would be. But how do we know how many grams that is.  Nutrition facts labels, show added sugars in grams. 

Here is how you do the math to determine the amount of sugar for yourself.

• The average daily calorie intake for most Americans is roughly 2,000 calories per day.
• Calculate how many calories make up 10% of that daily intake.
• Convert the number of calories to grams of added sugars so that people could easily calculate how much a food would impact this upper limit by using the Nutrition Facts label.  There are 4 calories per gram of sugar.
• Convert that amount to teaspoons of sugar to help you visualize how much sugar that is.  There are 4 grams of sugar in a teaspoon.
  

A person eating 2000 calories a day, should get no more than 200 calories per day from added sugars. That’s only 50 grams of added sugars per day! Since there are 4 grams of sugar in a teaspoon, that comes out to only 12.5 daily teaspoons.

As you eat sweetened foods read the labels to see how much added sugar is in the food.  If you add sugar to a food, remember each teaspoon is equal to 4 grams of added sugar or 16 calories.

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