What does added sugars mean on a label?

The two numbers sit one above the other and they are not measuring the same thing.

What each one counts

Total sugars is everything. The lactose that was always in the milk, the fructose that came with the fruit, and anything tipped in on top of those.

Added sugars is only the last part: what the recipe introduced. The rule is specific about the presentation, requiring the amount to be indented under total sugars and “prefaced with the word ‘Includes’ followed by the amount (in grams) ‘Added Sugars’”.

So the line reads Includes 8 g Added Sugars underneath a total of 12 g, and the 4 g difference is what the milk brought.

Why the distinction is worth using

It separates the food from the decision.

Plain yoghurt has sugar in it and always will, because milk contains lactose. Compare two yoghurts on total sugars and the plain one can look worse than a sweetened low-fat version whose numbers were engineered. Compare them on added sugars and the picture inverts, which is the more honest comparison of what each manufacturer chose to do.

For your blood glucose, a gram is a gram and your body does not read the panel. The added sugars line is a tool for comparing products, not a measure of what a food will do to you. Both of those are useful and they are not the same job.

Where it does not help

Fruit juice, which is treated as sugars that were already there even though the fibre that came with them has gone.

Sugar alcohols, which are not sugars and whose declaration is voluntary, so a sugar-free product may say nothing about how much of them it contains.

The ingredient list, which is where the sugars are named rather than counted, and where most of them appear under words that do not contain “sugar”. High fructose corn syrup is easy to spot. Honey counts as an added sugar when a manufacturer adds it, and reads as an ingredient rather than a sweetener.

The claim on the front

“No added sugar” is a claim about exactly one of these two lines. A juice or a dried fruit bar can carry it truthfully while delivering a large amount of total sugars.

That is not a trick. It is a precise claim being read as a general one, which is the most common way front-of-pack wording misleads without ever being false. The wider approach is on the page for reading labels when you are watching blood sugar.