Sucrose and Added Sugar: ICMR-NIN's Limit, Indian Intake and FSSAI Label Rules

Added sugar is sugar that a manufacturer, a cook or you put into food or drink, as opposed to the sugar already inside a fruit or a glass of milk. Table sugar, which is sucrose, is the main one in India, with jaggery and honey beside it. ICMR-NIN's Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024, allow an adult 25 to 30 g a day, under 5 per cent of energy, and say the body needs none. This entry is part of the carbohydrates section of the handbook and deals with intake and limits.

What counts as added sugar?

Every sugar and syrup added during processing, cooking or at the table counts. ICMR-NIN's 2024 guidelines name sucrose (table sugar), jaggery, honey, glucose, fructose and dextrose, and state that adding them raises total calories without adding nutritive value. The sugars inherently present in a food are a separate group: glucose and fructose in fruit, lactose in milk. FSSAI's labelling regulations use the same split, defining added sugars as monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods and beverages.

The WHO uses a slightly wider term, free sugars, which takes in everything above plus the sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates. Packaged juice therefore counts for the WHO even when nothing was added to it. What sucrose is made of, and how the body handles its fructose half, is covered in the entry on fructose, the fruit sugar.

Sucrose, jaggery and honey compared

They differ in flavour and colour far more than in sugar. ICMR-NIN's tables list table sugar as 100 g of carbohydrate and 400 kcal per 100 g, with no protein, fat or fibre. The Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 give cane jaggery 84.32 g of free sugars per 100 g, of which 58.23 g is sucrose, and the foreword to those tables records honey as about 80 per cent sugars. By ICMR-NIN's definition all three are added sugars, and a spoon of any of them comes out of the same daily allowance. The article on jaggery, honey or sugar weighs them as foods.

How much added sugar is allowed in India?

ICMR-NIN's 2024 guidelines say you may consume sugar, but it must be restricted to 25 to 30 g a day, and that added sugar should stay under 5 per cent of daily energy. On the 2,000 kcal reference diet, 5 per cent is 100 kcal, or 25 g. The same document defines anything above 25 g a day as high sugar and adds that sugar may be dropped altogether, since it supplies nothing except calories. If you do take sugar, it asks you to reduce cereals to keep total energy level.

In kitchen terms, ICMR-NIN's household measures put a teaspoon at 5 g, so 25 to 30 g is five or six level teaspoons across the whole day, from every source. For foods you buy, the guidelines set a threshold as well: more than 3 g of added sugar per 100 g of a solid food, or 2 g per 100 ml of a drink, places it among foods high in fat, sugar or salt.

The WHO guideline on free sugars

The WHO's 2015 guideline makes a strong recommendation that adults and children keep free sugars below 10 per cent of total energy, and a conditional one that going below 5 per cent, roughly 25 g or six teaspoons a day, would bring further benefit. The strong recommendation rests on evidence about body weight and tooth decay, the conditional one mainly on dental studies. India's 25 g sits at the stricter level.

How much sugar do Indians eat?

On average, less than the limit, with wide gaps between cities and households. ICMR-NIN's analysis of its 2015-16 urban survey, published with ILSI-India in 2019, covered 5,127 people in 1,293 households across seven metro cities. Average added sugar intake was 19.5 g a day, or 5.1 per cent of energy. Mumbai was highest at 26.3 g, then Ahmedabad at 25.9 g and Delhi at 23.2 g, with Bengaluru at 19.3 g, Kolkata at 17.1 g, Chennai at 16.1 g and Hyderabad at 15.5 g.

Averages hide the people above them. Women ate slightly more than men (20.2 g against 18.7 g), adults aged 36 to 59 the most of any age group (20.5 g), and vegetarians more than non-vegetarians (24 g against 18.2 g). Vegetarians in Kolkata averaged 30.6 g. The companion report on household data found 16 g per consumption unit a day in urban homes and 13 g in rural ones, ranging in rural areas from 7 g in West Bengal to 20 g in Karnataka.

A newer national picture comes from the ICMR-INDIAB survey of 18,090 adults, published in Nature Medicine in 2025. It counted only sugar, honey, jaggery and palm sugar added in cooking and at the table, and found median intakes ranging from 2.1 per cent of energy in the Northeast to 7.9 per cent in the North. Its authors note that they could not capture sugar from street food, sweetened drinks and other processed foods.

How much sugar is in chai, mithai and packaged drinks?

In the metro survey, people who drank tea took in an average of 14.4 g of added sugar a day from it, more than half of a 25 g allowance, and those who ate sweets averaged 21 g from them. The table gives what ICMR-NIN recorded for single items: the average amount eaten in a day by people who had that item, and the added sugar in it. These are survey averages worked out from recipes and labels, not laboratory analyses, and the report says exact contents may vary.

Two official figures fill in the drinks. ICMR-NIN's guidelines put sugarcane juice at 13 to 15 g of sugar per 100 ml and ask that it be kept to a minimum, and the WHO notes that a single can of sugar-sweetened soda can hold up to 40 g, about ten teaspoons. NNWA's pages on the calories in a cup of chai and the calories in Indian sweets go item by item, and the Indian food calorie counter adds up a day.

What does an FSSAI label tell you about sugar?

It must show total sugars and added sugars in grams, inside the carbohydrate line of the nutrition panel. FSSAI's labelling regulations of 2020 also require the share of the daily allowance that one serve provides, worked out on 50 g of added sugar for an average adult eating 2,000 kcal. That reference is twice the 25 g ICMR-NIN prefers, so a serve shown as 40 per cent of the allowance holds 20 g, which is 80 per cent of ICMR-NIN's figure. In the ingredient list, sucrose may appear simply as sugar.

Claims on the front of the pack have fixed meanings under the advertising and claims regulations of 2018. Low sugar means not more than 5 g of sugars per 100 g of a solid food or 2.5 g per 100 ml of a liquid. Sugar free means not more than 0.5 g per 100 g or 100 ml. A no added sugar claim is allowed only if no sugar of any type has gone in, which rules out honey, molasses and corn syrup, and no ingredient stands in for sugar, such as concentrated fruit juice or dried fruit paste.

What does the evidence say about sugar and health?

The firmest finding concerns body weight. A systematic review in the BMJ, done for the WHO guideline, pooled 30 trials and 38 cohort studies. Adults who cut their sugar intake while otherwise eating freely lost an average of 0.80 kg, and those who increased it gained 0.75 kg. With calories held equal, swapping sugar for other carbohydrate did not change weight, which suggests sugar acts mainly by raising energy intake. Children with the highest intake of sugar-sweetened drinks had 1.55 times the odds of being overweight after a year.

For diabetes, the evidence is observational. A meta-analysis of 17 cohorts found that each daily serving of sugar-sweetened drinks went with an 18 per cent higher incidence of type 2 diabetes, and 13 per cent after allowing for body fatness. Cohorts cannot prove cause. Sugar is one of several risk factors, and the type 2 diabetes diet guide sets it among the others.

The broadest summary is a 2023 umbrella review in the BMJ covering 73 meta-analyses. It found harmful associations between high sugar intake and many outcomes, but graded most of the evidence as low or moderate in quality. Its authors still recommended keeping free or added sugars below 25 g a day, the same figure ICMR-NIN arrived at.

A worked example: three cups of chai and one label

What follows is an illustrative example, made up for the sum. Take a 42-year-old shopkeeper in Ahmedabad who is vegetarian, drinks three cups of chai a day with two teaspoons of sugar in each, and eats one besan laddu after lunch. The tea comes to 6 teaspoons, or 30 g. Taking the survey's average of 17.2 g for a besan laddu, his day reaches about 47 g: 188 kcal, or 9.4 per cent of a 2,000 kcal diet, against ICMR-NIN's ceiling of 5 per cent.

Now suppose he buys a bottled drink whose label shows 20 g of added sugar per serve and 40 per cent of the daily allowance. That one bottle would take him to about 67 g. The cheaper fix is in the cup. One teaspoon per chai brings the tea to 15 g, and keeping the laddu to alternate days leaves an average near 24 g, inside the allowance.

Common mistakes and myths about sugar

The usual mistake is to count only white sugar. Jaggery in the dal, honey in warm water and the syrup around a rasgulla all count. Another is to trust the percentage on a label without noticing that it is worked out on 50 g. The article on how much sugar is safe in a day turns the WHO percentages into teaspoons for different calorie levels.

A second myth is that eating sugar is the single cause of diabetes. The evidence above links sweetened drinks with a higher risk, and body weight, family history and activity matter as well. A third is that a sugar-free label makes a sweet harmless, a claim the article on sugar-free sweeteners examines.

Too much sugar: the risks, and when to see a doctor

No upper limit is set beyond the allowances above, and there is no deficiency, since ICMR-NIN says added sugar may be eliminated completely. The risks of excess that ICMR-NIN names are surplus calories, overweight, and the displacement of foods that carry protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals. The WHO adds tooth decay. Babies and toddlers are a special case: ICMR-NIN asks for no added sugar before the age of two, and says pregnant and lactating women and children should avoid sugar substitutes.

See a doctor, and do not rely on cutting sugar alone, if you have unusual thirst, frequent urination, unexplained weight loss or wounds that are slow to heal, or if a blood test has shown raised glucose. If you already take medicine for diabetes, speak to your doctor before making a large change to what you eat, and do not stop or adjust a medicine yourself. Reducing sugar supports medical care. It does not replace it.

Learning this subject at NNWA

Label reading, the national guidelines and the counting of a day's food are taught at NNWA, a private skill academy in Kolkata whose classes run online in English and Hindi. Its courses, such as the Diabetes Nutrition course, prepare people to coach healthy clients and to refer medical cases to a doctor. They are skill courses, not degrees or dietitian qualifications.