How much added sugar per day?
The World Health Organization recommends keeping free sugars under 10% of your total energy, and suggests below 5% for additional benefit — roughly 25 g, about six teaspoons, a day at that stricter level[1]. It is a percentage rather than a fixed weight, so your own number follows your own energy target. Cutting sugar lowers body weight only when you do not replace the calories: 0.80 kg when people ate freely, and 0.04 kg when the same energy came back as other carbohydrate[2].
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The limit is about "free" sugars, not all sugar
The guideline everything else rests on comes from the World Health Organization, and the first thing to get right is what it covers. Free sugars are the monosaccharides and disaccharides added to food and drink by a manufacturer, a cook or you, plus the sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates[1].
So the spoonful stirred into tea counts. The sugar in a pastry counts. Honey counts, which surprises people. The sugar inside an intact orange or a glass of milk is not what the recommendation is aimed at — squeeze the orange into juice and it is.
The number, and why it is a percentage
WHO makes a strong recommendation to reduce free sugars to less than 10% of total energy intake, and a conditional further recommendation to go below 5%[1]. The conditional half is weaker on purpose: the evidence behind the 10% level is stronger than the evidence behind 5%[1].
Notice that the limit is a share of your energy, not a fixed weight. That is why two honest sources can quote different gram figures — they are assuming different daily intakes. WHO's own illustration of the stricter level is roughly 25 g, about six teaspoons, per day[1]. If your own energy target is lower than the one behind that figure, your share is lower too; the macro split guide shows where carbohydrate sits inside a daily target in the first place.
Does cutting sugar actually cut weight?
This is the part most articles get backwards. A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials and cohort studies found that when people ate freely, reducing free sugars lowered body weight by 0.80 kg, with a confidence interval of 0.39 to 1.21[2]. But when sugar was swapped for the same amount of energy from other carbohydrate, the weight change was 0.04 kg — effectively nothing, with a confidence interval from −0.04 to 0.13[2].
Read those two results together and the mechanism is not mysterious. Sugar does not have a special power to make fat. It is unusually easy to consume a lot of energy from, and when you remove it without replacing the calories, intake falls. Replace them and the effect goes away.
That has a practical consequence worth stating plainly: cutting sugar and then adding a "healthy" biscuit with the same energy in it will not move anything, and cutting sugar is not a substitute for knowing your own intake.
Where it hides on our tables
A sugar-sweetened soft drink is the densest common source. WHO states that a single can can contain up to 40 g of free sugars, around ten teaspoons[1] — which on the stricter 5% level is a whole day's allowance in one drink[1].
And the habit is heavier in this region than in most. In an analysis of intakes across 185 countries, the Middle East and North Africa averaged 4.6 servings of sugar-sweetened beverages per week against a global mean of 2.7[3].
Three other places it accumulates quietly:
- Tea and coffee through the day. Two spoons, five or six times, is not a treat — it is a baseline. It is also the single easiest line to edit, because nobody is emotionally attached to spoon number two.
- Fresh juice. The moment fruit becomes juice its sugars are free sugars by definition[1], and a glass goes down in seconds without the chewing that made the whole fruit filling.
- Ramadan and Eid drinks and desserts. Qamar al-din, tamarind and sweetened dairy drinks sit beside the meal rather than in it, so they rarely get logged at all.
Reading a label without doing arithmetic all day
Packaged food in the region increasingly carries a sugars line, and two habits make it usable. First, read the per-100 g column rather than the per-serving one, because a "serving" is chosen by the manufacturer and is often smaller than the portion anyone eats. Second, check the ingredients order: sugar, glucose syrup, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate and honey are all free sugars[1], and a product listing three of them in the first five ingredients is a confectionery item whatever the front of the box says.
One caution on the label line itself. "Total sugars" includes the sugars naturally in milk and fruit, which the WHO limit is not aimed at[1], so a plain yoghurt and a sweetened one can look closer on that line than they really are.
What to do first
Take the drinks before the desserts. The evidence that matters here is that sugar reduction works by reducing energy intake[2], and a sweetened drink is where the most energy leaves the fastest with the least missed. Cut the sugar in hot drinks by one spoon and hold it for a fortnight rather than declaring sugar over forever on a Sunday night. Nothing in the guideline asks for zero[1].
Sources
- World Health Organization. Guideline: Sugars Intake for Adults and Children. Geneva: WHO; 2015 (and the accompanying WHO news release, 4 March 2015). ↩
- Te Morenga L, Mallard S, Mann J. Dietary sugars and body weight: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials and cohort studies. BMJ 2013;346:e7492. ↩
- Lara-Castor L, Micha R, Cudhea F, et al. Sugar-sweetened beverage intakes among adults between 1990 and 2018 in 185 countries. Nature Communications 2023;14:5957. ↩