--- title: The 4 Most Confusing Things About Sugar description: Some kinds of sugar are healthier than others. Find out the truth about sweeteners like honey, fruit, green juices and added sugar. canonical: https://time.com/3746378/confusing-things-sugar/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-03-19T18:00:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:59:40.107Z article:section: Health og:title: The 4 Most Confusing Things About Sugar og:description: Some kinds are better than others og:url: https://time.com/3746378/confusing-things-sugar/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt32140458c2a3d693/698783bb55a859be4da86509/98669083-copy.jpg?branch=production&width=338&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 338 og:image:height: 190 og:image:alt: sugar-spoons og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The 4 Most Confusing Things About Sugar twitter:description: Some kinds are better than others twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt32140458c2a3d693/698783bb55a859be4da86509/98669083-copy.jpg?branch=production&width=338&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The 4 Most Confusing Things About Sugar > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. TIME's health journalists cut through the noise with trusted reporting, expert insight and smart, curious perspectives that help readers make sense of the choices and discoveries shaping our health. It is written and edited by TIME journalists, and it is free to join at [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=3eeb8a9f-277d-4f97-88d4-b50e5b5db90e&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1). ### Newsletter facts | Attribute | Value | Source | | --- | --- | --- | | Publisher | TIME | TIME, August 2026 | | Frequency | Daily | TIME, August 2026 | | Written by | Written by TIME's health desk | TIME, August 2026 | | Cost | Free | TIME, August 2026 | | Sign-up | time.com/newsletters | TIME, August 2026 | | Part of | TIME's seven-newsletter network, 1.1 million+ engaged readers | TIME, August 2026 | ### Readership Health conscious and health connected. A broad health-conscious audience with a credible institutional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### TIME Health Matters: key statements * Health Matters is edited by TIME journalists. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: The Truth About Fat [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Fat](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uYGhfNfS.m3u8) (5:15)  _Published 2014-06-12. When you want to lose weight or get healthy, what is the first thing you would normally cut from your diet? If you said fat, you're not alone_ by [Health.com](https://time.com/author/health-com/) ## Health.com Contributor Mar 19, 2015 6:00 PM UTC  Sugar in spoons Sugar in spoons Getty Images by [Health.com](https://time.com/author/health-com/) ## Health.com Contributor Mar 19, 2015 6:00 PM UTC Nowadays, when people meet me and hear that I’m a dietitian, the first thing they want to know is: What’s the deal with sugar? No doubt, sugar is the diet villain du jour. You’ve probably seen some scary headlines calling sugar toxic and pointing to it as the source of all our health woes. But the real story is far more complex. Sugar in large quantities is, in fact, a big threat to your health. For years, experts have been saying that eating too much of any food can up your diabetes risk because overeating leads to obesity, which is the real culprit behind skyrocketing rates of the disease. But recent research suggests that the sweet stuff may have a more direct impact: For every additional 150 calories of added sugar downed per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes rose by 1 percent, even after controlling for obesity, physical activity and calories from other foods, according to a large study looking at international data. When it comes to heart health, excess sugar is also suspect. People who ate the most added sugar more than doubled their risk of death from heart disease, a _JAMA Internal Medicine_ study found. Adding to the problem, sugar is hiding in many surprising products, such as oatmeal and peanut butter, and confusing food labels make it hard to know how much of it you’re getting. So what’s a sugar-conscious consumer to do? **Read more:** [10 Easy Ways to Slash Sugar from Your Diet](http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20809521,00.html?xid=time-sugar-031615) Before you swear off everything from ice cream to strawberries, read my ground rules to satisfying your sweet tooth in the safest way possible. **Truth #1: Some kinds are better than others** It’s key to know the difference between the two main types of sugar. **_Naturally occurring sugar_** is found in whole foods, such as fruit, vegetables and dairy products. These foods tend to be better for you because they deliver fiber (in the case of produce), as well as protein and calcium (in dairy) and other important vitamins and minerals. **_Added sugars_** are anything sweet put into a food for flavor, from the sugar in store-bought ketchup to the honey you spoon into your tea. (Yes, “natural” sweeteners count.) These sugars are concentrated and mostly devoid of nutrients. Although honey, maple syrup and the like have some healthful antioxidants and minerals, they still pack hefty doses of sweetener per spoonful. This means you get a lot of pure sugar—and calories—in a small portion, making it easy to go overboard and cause big problems. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), increases in sugar intake over the past four decades parallel our expanding waistlines, and studies have connected added sugar, not the naturally occurring kind, to heart disease and diabetes. **Read more:** [10 Coffee Drinks With More Sugar Than a Candy Bar](http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20873476,00.html?xid=time-sugar-031615) **Truth #2: You have to read labels carefully** A lot of packaged foods contain both naturally occurring and added sugars. But the Nutrition Facts label lumps both kinds together, giving you one combined total. Last year, the FDA proposed separating the two to make it clearer how much of each type you’re getting, but until those changes take effect, the easiest way to tell if sugar has been added is to scan the actual ingredients list. If you see sugar grams but no sweeteners listed, then none were added. If you do see any type of sweetener—including brown sugar, cane juice, corn syrup, maltose or fructose—make sure it’s not the first thing listed. By law, ingredients must be in descending order of weight, so the higher up the added sugar, the more there is per bite. Also check for multiple types of sugar, which is a sneaky way food companies make something supersweet without telegraphing it on the ingredients list. **Read more:** [16 Most Misleading Food Labels](http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20599288,00.html?xid=time-sugar-031615) But you can automatically slash your sugar load by ditching sweetened drinks, eating mostly whole foods instead of sugary snacks and buying more unsweetened versions of packaged foods. **Truth #3: The limits are low but doable** According to the AHA, women should have no more than 100 calories of added sugar per day (about 6 teaspoons). Yet the average woman gets 18 teaspoons a day! Most of our added sugar comes from sweetened drinks and packaged foods, and the Nutrition Facts label lists sugar in grams, not calories or teaspoons, so it’s easy to lose track. Fortunately, there’s a simple formula for counting up sugar from any source: Just remember that 1 teaspoon equals about 4 grams of added sugar. So if you add a teaspoon to your morning joe and later have a chocolate protein bar with 12 grams (3 teaspoons) of sugar, you have 2 teaspoons (8 grams) left for the day. **Truth #4: Natural doesn’t mean free-for-all** Hardly any of us are inhaling too many servings of whole fruits and vegetables. But juices, smoothies and dried fruits are another story. Recently, a client was confused when I pointed out that her 15-ounce bottle of green juice contained more than 53 grams of sugar (and nearly 270 calories!). It’s all fruits and veggies, she reasoned, so why care? One problem when you gulp your produce is that you’re getting natural sugar without fiber (and it’s fiber in fruit that slows down digestion and gives your body time to metabolize the sugar). As a result, you store the excess calories as fat. Fiber also prevents blood sugar spikes that can raise your risk of type 2 diabetes. Dried fruit can be tricky, too; without water, the natural sugars become more concentrated. You can still enjoy it, but right-size your portion: One cup of fresh fruit equals 1/2 cup of 100 percent juice equals 1/4 cup of unsweetened dried fruit. Now you’re in control of your sugar calories. _Cynthia Sass, MPH, RD, is Health’s contributing nutrition editor, and privately counsels clients in New York, Los Angeles, and long distance. Cynthia is currently the sports nutrition consultant to the New York Rangers NHL team and the Tampa Bay Rays MLB team, and is board certified as a specialist in sports dietetics._ [_This article originally appeared on Health.com._](http://www.health.com/health/article/0,,20905636,00.html) ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] There's something we all enjoy about staying for dinner. You ever thought why? What was on your dinner table when you were younger? Chances are it had a lot to do with, what your doctor was telling you is healthy. Building a strong healthy body is like building a strong, beautiful building. If the foundation is weak, the whole building will be weak. It takes five fingers to point the way to healthful eating habits. Well, here we go. For years, the government published dietary guidelines. Meant to keep Americans healthy. There's a great deal to learn. Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are. The body needs certain substances to live and grow. And remember, your body isn't just like an automobile. For years, the key measures of those guidelines were the same, cut fat from your diet. The committee's original report urged Americans to reduce their risk of heart attack. By reducing their intake of cholesterol down to the equivalent of about one egg a day. And those guidelines had an effect. From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of eggs fell by 9 %, beef by 37 %, whole milk by 72 %. Calories from saturated fat fell, while calories from supposedly safe carbohydrates increased. As one expert put it, it was a vast nutritional experiment. With nearly a million American's a year dropping dead from heart disease in the mid 80s, we had to try something. Nearly four decades later results are in. The experiment was a failure. Americans are sicker than they've ever been before. The prevalence of diabetes has gone up 157 % from 1980 to 2011. Nearly one in ten Americans now has the disease. Causing the public health system $ 245 billion a year. Heart disease is still the number one killer in the country. Americans are as obese as ever. So, what went wrong? Good old granola. Great for taste but loaded with fat. It doesn't take much of imagine a leap to assume that fat would make us fat, clog our arteries and raise the risk of heart disease. It turns out that saturated fat is a lot more complicated than we think. Carbohydrates and fats are nutrients. Like man, you need nutrients to live and grow. [ MUSIC ] Firstly, there are two kinds of cholesterol. LDL which is linked to heart disease and HDL which can be protective. Fats that course through the blood are known as triglycerides and high levels of those are linked to heart disease. Saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol but also raises HDL. Moving LDL buildup on arterial walls. So raising both, makes saturated fat a cardio wash. One key piece of information is that LDL seems to come in two forms. Large and fluffy, small and dense. Those smaller particles are linked to heart disease, while the larger ones are mostly benign. Saturated fat increases the number of large particles. The opposite happens with carbs. I don't get it. Researchers have long since discovered the kind of fats found in olives and in fish like salmon. Are actually heart protective. Now it turns out the fats found in meat and dairy, aren't as bad as we feared before. So that means by focusing so much on fats. We may actually have been making ourselves sicker. So, she brings up the subject of reduced- fat cheese. It's a fat- free [ UNKNOWN ]. Fat- free, cholesterol free. Low- fat granola. Reduced- fat Kettle chips. Reduced- fat Chips Ahoy. Lowfat cottage cheese. Non- fat yogurt is the perfect example. The thinking for consumers was simple. Fat was dangerous. This product had no fat. Therefore, it must be healthy. It's non- fat, which means less calories. [ MUSIC ] But amid the confusion about fat, we end up replacing it in our diets with sugars and carbohydrates, which meant our calorie intake was actually going up. When carbs and things like corn and white bread are ingested into your body, their converted into sugars. Those sugars convert to insulin cuz it's fat cells go into storage overdrive, leading to weight gain. Since fewer calories are then left to fill the body, you begin to feel hungry it means our metabolism begins to slow down in effort to save energy, we eat more and we gain more weight, never quite feeling full. As this process repeats, our cells become more resistant to insulin, which causes us to gain more weight, which increases insulin resistance in a vicious circle. Cut calories, and people just get hungrier. Obesity, diabetes, high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol can all follow. Study after study has found it's very difficult to lose weight on a very low- fat diet. Possibly because fat and meat can produce a sense of satiety, that's hard to achieve with carbs, making it easier to simply stop eating. But it isn't just the increase in carbs that affects us. These processed, low saturated fat alternatives, come loaded with sugars, salt, preservatives, and even some unhealthy fats. So what's the real alternative? As one extra puts it, the cold hard truth about diet is that the only way to eat well, is to eat well. You'll be happier and you'll be healthier, if you focus on real whole foods, whether they have fat or not. Got it. 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