6 of the Most Secretly Sugary Snacks

A little bit of sugar is okay. The odd Mars Bar here and the occasional piece of toffee there won’t cause your teeth to instantly fall out. However, consistently munching on super sugary snacks can turn your pearly whites to Edam and no one wants that!

The message from healthcare professionals is always the same: Cut down the amount of sugar you consume.

Unfortunately, that’s often easier to say than do.

Supermarkets are rife with secretly sugary snacks that can easily sneak past your health-conscious defences to rot away your teeth.

In this blog, I’m going to single out six of the most secretly sugary snacks to help you identify (and hopefully cut out) where the sugar you eat and drink comes from.

Low-Fat Foods

Typical Sugar (per 100g): 8.5g

Low-fat foods are super popular amongst health-conscious diners. Low-fat yoghurt, low-fat ready meals, low-fat spreads and so on and so on.

Low-fat versions of regular foods market themselves as a healthy alternative to the fat-rich original. However, when you take the fat out of foods, you often lose a lot of the natural flavour. To counteract this, manufacturers tend to pump in sugar.

What was supposed to be a healthier alternative suddenly becomes a high-sugar snack that’s just as bad, if not worse, for you than the original.

Just look at these two yoghurts from Yeo Valley.

The low-fat variety has 30 percent more sugar in it! And it’s something that’s supposed to be healthier!

Soft Drinks

Typical Sugar (per 100ml): 10.6g

I know, I know. Telling you that soft drinks are high in sugar is a little like saying fire is hot. Everyone already knows that soft drinks are super sugary but we keep drinking them anyhow!

If you need an extra push to quit sugary drinks, check out this awesome video from Home Science, which shows you just how much sugar is in some soft drinks. It amazed us and we spend several hours a day thinking about foods, drinks

Fruit Juice

Typical Sugar (per 100ml): 8.8g

Just like a whole piece of fruit, fruit juice is packed full of vitamins and minerals. Unfortunately, all that good stuff comes with a large dose of sugar thrown in.

And since it takes a lot of fruit to produce a small amount of juice, you’re concentrating all that sugar into one drink. This makes it super easy to consume a large amount of sugar, without actually thinking about it.

A 330ml serving of Tropicana Original contains 29g of sugar, which is almost as much as a can of Coca-Cola!

While fruit juice is great in moderation, it’s generally best to go for whole pieces of fruit as they generally have less sugar and more fibre.

Flavoured Coffees

Typical Sugar (per 100ml): 13.9g

Coffee is naturally quite bitter so you often find baristas pile in heaps and heaps of sugar to balance it out.

But I bet you don’t know quite how much sugar!

A large caramel frappuccino from Starbucks is loaded with 61g sugar! That’s 14 and a half teaspoons! That’s almost two full cans of Coca-Cola!

The NHS recommends you consume a maximum of 30g of sugar a day, which gives you an idea of quite how sugary this coffee is!

Sports Drinks

Typical Sugar (per 100ml): 12.9g

It’s easy to think that sports drinks are super good for your health. After all, that’s how they’re marketed.

However, sports drinks are designed to be consumed by people who are actually exercising and who are burning through their body’s energy supplies.

If you aren’t exercising, there’s really no reason your drinks should be packed full of sugar.

A small 380ml bottle of Lucozade, for example, has a whopping 49g of sugar packed in!

That level of sugar might be okay if you’re a professional rugby player or an Olympic sprinter but it’s definitely not necessary for most of us.

Canned Soup

Typical Sugar (per 100ml): 4.6g

I know what you’re thinking, soup is usually more at home on a dieting list than one about sugary snacks.

Unfortunately, commercially produced tinned soups often have a lot of extra added ingredients and sugar is usually chief amongst them.

A standard tin of Heinz Tomato Soup has 14g of sugar, which is obviously not as much as most of the snacks on this list but is still much higher than you might expect.