Confused how many grams of sugar per day for adults?

Do you have diabetes pre-diabetes, or PCOS? If not, simply reduce calories and you will reduce sugar intake since you will be eating less. Eating at an appropriate calorie level is far more important than simply focusing on sugar even though it is the currently demonized part of food.

Sugar isn't the issue (unless you're suffering from a health issue due to it). There's sugar in fruits and vegetables, yet they are deemed fine to consume in quantity.
Your concern for weight loss/gain/maintenance is your overall calories. For health, you want to make sure you get in the correct amount of macronutrients.

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I have a large bowl of fruit for breakfast and therefore always go over my sugar goal, but it is natural and not added sugar! Xxx

EvieSquill22 wrote: »

Hey everybody I've been reading into cutting sugar out of my diet but there are different sources saying different things. Some say its 6g per day. 25g. 60g. Or 90g. Thoughts? Sugar is in everything so I'm struggling to understand what my limit is supposed to be? I'm from the UK.

Are you trying to cut sugar out (which would mean added sugar, and then you wouldn't worry about grams) or meet a limit? (For the record, I think there's no need to cut out added sugar, but you said cut out.)

As for the limits, here is the breakdown:

The WHO and the US Dietary Guidelines recommend no more than 10% of calories in added sugar with the WHO further recommending no more than 5% if that works for you. The NHS also recommends no more than 5%. How much that is depends on your total calories -- for example, if maintenance is 2000, then under 10% would mean no more than 50 g of added sugar, and under 5% would mean no more than 25 g of added sugar. (The WHO actually counts sugar in juice (as well as syrup and honey) as "added sugar" even though technically that sugar isn't added.)

The 90 g number, I believe, is one the UK or Australian gov't have considered in order to have a limit for TOTAL sugar. The problem with it is that so far there's no credible evidence that the total amount of sugar matters or that having lots of sugar from nutrient-dense sources in a good balanced diet is bad for us. The reasoning the WHO et al. give for the limits on ADDED sugar is that they tend to come with lots of calories (often not from sugar itself, but fat) and few nutrients, and also that there's a connection with tooth decay (which can be mitigated through oral hygiene, of course).

Does that help? If you have questions I'd be happy to elaborate.

As for what I'd personally recommend (not that you should care) ;-) -- I think it makes sense to eat a healthy, balanced diet, so I focus on getting my calories right and eating enough protein, healthy fats, fiber, and especially lots of vegetables. If I do that I don't have to worry about overeating added sugar (and my added sugar normally averages below 5% without me bothering to track it, but just looking at it sometimes). I don't think at all about sugar that comes with foods like fruit and sweet potatoes and so on, and I think most probably don't have to worry about overeating fruit, but with everything else in my diet I don't eat a huge amount of fruit anyway -- probably 1-3 servings depending on the time of year (I prefer eating more vegetables).