Some sugar is easy to remember: the warm chocolate croissant from your favorite bakery or the handful of candy at the movies. The rest tends to fly under the radar. It’s in sauces, salad dressings, flavored yogurts, breakfast cereals and the coffee drink that gets you through a long morning.
All those little amounts can add up quickly, making it surprisingly easy to consume more added sugar than health organizations recommend.
How much sugar is too much?
Before getting into the numbers, it helps to understand the two main types of sugar: naturally occurring sugar and added sugar.
Naturally occurring sugar is already present in whole foods. Fruit and vegetables contain fructose, while milk contains lactose. These foods also bring other nutrients to the table. Fruit contains fiber, water, vitamins and minerals, which can slow the absorption of its natural sugars and limit their impact on blood sugar. Plain dairy has protein and bone-supporting calcium, plus a specific nutrient makeup that affects how it is digested.
In other words, there’s no reason to start side-eyeing your berries or apple. Unless your healthcare provider has told you otherwise, keep eating fruit.
Added sugar is put into foods during processing, cooking or preparation. White and brown sugar, honey, maple syrup and high-fructose corn syrup all count. Because regularly eating too much added sugar has been associated with several health concerns, health organizations have established limits to help guide us:
- U.S. Dietary Guidelines: Keep added sugar below 10% of your total daily calories. For someone eating 2,000 calories per day, 50 grams is considered your daily value.
- American Heart Association: No more than 36 grams per day for men and 25 grams per day for women.
- World Health Organization: Keep free sugars below 5% of total daily calories. “Free sugars” is a slightly broader category that includes added sugars as well as sugars naturally present in foods like honey, syrups and fruit juice.
Yes, these are different numbers. Yes, that makes it confusing. The amount that makes sense for you can depend on your overall diet, calorie needs, activity level, health and goals. Think of these recommendations as useful guideposts rather than a perfectly personalized number.
Where is the sugar hiding?
More places than you might think. To give you a better idea of foods that may contain added sugar, here’s a quick list as outlined by a study in Frontiers in Nutrition:
- The obvious treats: Candy, chocolate, cookies, cakes, pastries and frozen desserts
- Drinks: Soda, fruit drinks, sports and energy drinks, sweetened coffee and tea, and commercially prepared smoothies
- Breakfast foods: Cereals, muffins, pancakes, waffles and flavored yogurt
- The easier-to-miss sources: Breads, tortillas, salad dressings, cream substitutes, flavored spreads and flavored milk
- Sweeteners and spreads: Honey, maple syrup and jam
When you’re comparing packaged foods, the Nutrition Facts label can help. Under Total Sugars, you’ll see “Includes X g Added Sugars,” followed by a percentage Daily Value. The Daily Value is 50 grams on a 2,000-calorie diet. Five percent or less is considered low in added sugar, while 20% or more is high. As a helpful visual, 1 teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams. So a food that has 20 grams of added sugar has 5 teaspoons of sugar.
What happens when you regularly consume too much sugar?
Your body can handle some sugar, but the bigger concern is what may happen when added sugar regularly takes up more of your diet than recommended. Here’s how that can play out in different parts of the body.
Contributes to metabolic dysfunction
When you eat carbohydrates, your digestive system breaks them down into glucose and other simple sugars. As blood glucose rises, your pancreas releases insulin, which helps move glucose into your cells for energy.
Excess glucose in the blood results in high blood sugar. Over time, repeating this pattern can contribute to insulin resistance and, eventually, type 2 diabetes. Excess weight gain and belly fat, which can occur if you’re consuming more calories than your body needs, are additional risk factors for type 2 diabetes.
Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) list too much added sugar as a contributor to weight gain and obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. That said, eating sugar doesn’t automatically mean you will develop type 2 diabetes. The relationship is more complicated than that. One recent meta-analysis did not find a clear association between added sugar on its own and type 2 diabetes, although that finding was based on just two cohorts and the evidence was considered limited. Where researchers did see a clearer pattern was in drinks: Both sugar-sweetened beverages and fruit juice were associated with a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Bloodwork can offer another window into how your body is handling glucose over time. Prenuvo’s Executive Panel lab testing includes markers such as blood glucose, hemoglobin A1c and insulin-related measures that can add useful information about your metabolic health.
Related: What your bloodwork says about your health
Changes weight and body composition
A 2024 study in Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases found that greater added sugar intake was associated with weight gain, a larger waist circumference, a 28% higher risk of obesity and a 27% higher risk of abdominal obesity, or excess visceral fat, over several decades.
Related: New study links waist size to heart risk, even with a “normal” BMI
Added sugar can also say something about the overall pattern of a person’s diet. Higher intake may go along with more nutrient-poor, ultra-processed foods and more calories overall. The study’s authors also point to possible effects on gut microbes, hunger cues and hormones, all of which could make overeating more likely.
Related: 3 surprising facts Prenuvo data shows about belly fat—and how to reduce it
This is where understanding your body composition, and how it changes alongside habits like diet, can be helpful. Prenuvo’s Body Composition Analysis looks beyond the number on the scale by measuring fat and lean mass. Your Body Composition Report can help you understand what your weight is actually made up of and how it changes over time.
Impairs liver function
Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD)—often dubbed “fatty liver”—affects one in three adults in the U.S. Over time, this condition can progress to cirrhosis, a risk factor for liver cancer. “Fatty liver” is also associated with type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS, formerly PCOS), obesity, high cholesterol, and heart disease.
While the mechanism is complex and there are many contributors to MASLD, researchers think that eating too much added sugar may promote increased fat production while impairing fat breakdown. Ultimately, this may contribute to fat accumulation in the liver. Another concern is how excess calorie consumption and weight gain are linked to an increase in visceral fat, which has been shown in studies to be one biomarker for MASLD.
Knowing if you have excess visceral fat may provide some clues into the state of your overall health, including the health of your liver. It may also tell you how your brain is doing, too, as Prenuvo’s own research has connected visceral abdominal fat with midlife brain atrophy. The Advanced Brain Health Scan can clue you into the size and structure of key brain regions.
Related: Prenuvo’s AI-assisted research reveals link between visceral abdominal fat and midlife brain atrophy
Impacts heart health
In one large observational study, people who consumed the most added sugar had a 21% higher risk of dying from any cause than those who consumed the least. Higher intake, particularly from sweetened beverages, was also associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, according to The Journal of Nutrition.
Body mass index (BMI) was also partially responsible for the connection. The authors say it may be due to metabolic disease, higher triglyceride levels, inflammation, and obesity that drives conditions like hypertension, all of which add stress to your heart.
Although testing can’t reveal the effect sugar alone is having on your heart, Prenuvo’s Advanced Heart Health Scan uses MyoStrain® analysis to measure heart muscle function, providing additional information to complement standard cardiac tests. When combined with your Whole Body Scan, it adds functional information alongside structural imaging, helping place cardiac function in the context of overall health.
Drags down oral health
One of the first things many of us were told as kids in relation to sugar was that eating too much of it would cause cavities. It’s true that excess sugar is harmful for oral health. An earlier review, which helped inform WHO sugar guidelines, found an association between added sugar and cavities in all five adult studies it examined. That association was weaker when added sugar accounted for less than 10% of calorie intake.
No one wants a drill to the tooth, but more than that, excess sugar also contributes to inflammation that changes the bacterial balance in your gut and oral microbiome and promotes obesity and metabolic syndrome, which is also linked to periodontal inflammation. Together, you may be more prone to developing gum disease, suggests a review in BDJ Open.
How to reduce your sugar intake
If you want to eat less added sugar, start with what you drink on an average day and choose one realistic place to scale back. That might mean ordering fewer pumps of syrup, switching one soda for sparkling water or saving sports drinks for long, demanding workouts when they serve a real purpose. A sweet coffee or sports drink can absolutely have a place, but drinks are also one of the easiest ways for added sugar to pile up without leaving you especially full.
From there, look at the foods that show up most often in your routine. The sugar in a daily cereal, flavored yogurt or sauce can add up more quickly than the dessert you have once in a while. Make the Nutrition Facts label do some of the work for you by comparing similar products. Five percent of the Daily Value or less is considered low in added sugar, while 20% or more is high.
Fruit can carry some of the sweetness, too. Add berries to plain yogurt or oatmeal, or use a banana to sweeten a smoothie. You still get the flavor, along with fiber and other nutrients.
And keep the sugar you actually enjoy. Cutting back on the kind you barely notice can leave more room for the treat that genuinely feels worth it.
Finding the sweet spot
Sugar doesn’t need to become something you fear. It’s worth knowing where it shows up and which sources are doing most of the adding. Whole fruit and plain dairy bring fiber, protein and other nutrients along with their natural sugars. Added sugars, especially in drinks and packaged foods, can be much easier to consume without realizing it.
A realistic goal is to keep the sugar that feels worth it and pay closer attention to the kind you barely knew was there.
Beyond that, health data can add context that habits alone cannot. Bloodwork, body composition measurements and whole body imaging each reveal something different, while combining those results can help you and your healthcare team see how they fit together. Prenuvo Membership brings these services into one ongoing view of your health.
To learn more about a Prenuvo Membership or standalone services, book a call with the Patient Services Team.
