Sugar Gallery

Helping parents make healthier low sugar food choices for their children

Welcome to My Sugar Gallery. This gallery is designed to be a visual reference tool for parents, showing how much sugar everyday food items can contribute to children's daily sugar intakes.

How to interpret the sugar gallery graphics

The daily sugar intake guidelines

These graphics are based on the World Health Organisation sugar guidelines. Essentially the WHO recommends everyone should reduce their free/added sugar intake to less than 10% of total energy, with a further recommendation that a reduction to 5% of could be even better. This is detailed in my article the one that explains how much sugar is actually healthy for your child. The guidelines are below by age. Essentially it is like a traffic light system.

  • Green < 5% of energy
  • Orange 5-10% of energy
  • Red 10% of energy

Each guideline is clickable if you would like further information by age.

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Foods and product sugar graphics

Again these use the traffic light system. The serving size is always specified and I try to keep this similar across product categories.  The total amount of sugar in teaspoons in that serving is specified

  • The spoons start as BLACK for each age
  • If the sugar content per serving is less than 5% of energy for that age the spoons will be GREEN
  • If the sugar content per serving is between 5 and 10% of energy for that age the spoons will be ORANGE
  • If the sugar content per serving exceeds 10% of energy for that age the spoons will be RED

Remember added sugar adds up quickly

Something to keep in mind when checking out my gallery, is that each picture relates to just that one food. So although a product may have a green spoon, if you are having a number of green spoon foods throughout the day it can soon add up. The quick video below shows how this can happen.

The gallery

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