List of sugary foods, with grams of sugar per serving

Sugar shows up well beyond the dessert table. This list gathers 34 everyday foods, from a can of cola and a bowl of frosted cereal to ketchup, granola bars and maple syrup, with the grams of sugar in a typical serving and in 100 g. Every figure comes from an official nutrient database, either Health Canada's Canadian Nutrient File or the USDA's FoodData Central, and each row names its source entry. The numbers are total sugars, the same measure shown on the Nutrition Facts table, so they include the sugars naturally present in milk and fruit as well as added sugar.

If you want the story behind each aisle, including how sugar is sold, labelled and marketed, our eight food-type guides go deeper. For how much sugar whole countries eat, see sugar consumption by country.

Sugary foods list: grams of sugar per serving and per 100 g

Foods are grouped by aisle and sorted by sugar per serving. Each group heading links to the guide for that aisle.

Figures are total sugars from Health Canada's Canadian Nutrient File 2015 (CNF) or, where marked FNDDS, the USDA FoodData Central survey database. The per-serving value is the database value per 100 g multiplied by the database weight of the stated serving. Products and recipes vary, so the Nutrition Facts table on your package is the final word. Milk, yogurt, juice and dried fruit carry naturally occurring sugars that count in these totals.

Foods with 50 g of sugar or more in one serving

Very few ordinary single servings reach 50 g of total sugars. In the list above, only three servings do, and all three are large drinks: the 473 mL energy drink, the medium frozen coffee drink and the medium slush. Getting past 50 g almost always takes a large drink or an oversized portion. The restaurant sweet and sour chicken is a full takeout order that is often shared.

Want the story behind the numbers? Each aisle has its own guide.

From the included PDF

The Epidemiological and Metabolic History of Dietary Sugars: A Two-Century Analysis of Chronic Disease and Oncology The macronutrient composition of the human diet has undergone a profound transformation over the past two centuries, characterized most distinctly by the exponential increase in the consumption of refined sugars.

From its historical origins as a prohibitively expensive luxury reserved for European aristocracy, sucrose—and subsequently high-fructose corn syrup—evolved into a ubiquitous, low-cost dietary staple worldwide.

Concurrently, industrialized nations witnessed a meteoric rise in the incidence of non-communicable diseases, encompassing obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and various malignancies.