Teaspoons of sugar, food by food

What each figure is

The figure next to each food answers one question: how many 4g teaspoons of table sugar would raise blood glucose by about as much as that portion? It is not the "sugars" line from a nutrition label. A label counts sugars as a chemical group and leaves starch out, even though digestion turns starch into glucose. The teaspoon figure covers all the digestible carbohydrate in the portion, whether it started as sugar or as starch.

The method belongs to Dr David Unwin, Dr David Haslam and Dr Geoffrey Livesey, who published it in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in 2016. A food's glycaemic load is its glycaemic index multiplied by the grams of available carbohydrate in the portion, divided by 100. One teaspoon of table sugar has a glycaemic load of 2.73, so a food's teaspoon figure is its glycaemic load divided by 2.73. The page what is glycaemic load works through the arithmetic.

How to read the list

Read the portion before the number. Most portions are an ordinary serving with a gram weight: a 30g slice of bread, a 150g bowl of rice, a 120g piece of fruit. 6 foods are given per 100g or 100ml because that is how their source printed them, and 100g of honey is a larger amount than most people eat at once. Twice the portion is twice the figure.

The categories follow the calculator's tabs. Within each category, foods are listed in the order of the calculator rather than by size of figure, so neighbouring rows are not a ranking. 4 foods carry a figure of zero, because their portion contains no measurable available carbohydrate or has a glycaemic index of zero.

What each food page shows

Each food links to a page of its own. That page gives the glycaemic index and the grams of carbohydrate where the source printed them, the glycaemic load, and the arithmetic that leads to the teaspoon figure. It names the chart or table the figure was read from, notes where two published charts give different figures for the same food, and sets the food beside two or three others from the list.

Every value comes from Dr David Unwin's charts, distributed free by the Public Health Collaboration at phcuk.org/sugar and used with PHC's permission, from Table 1 of the 2016 paper, or, for three meats and fish, from a carbohydrate content of zero in USDA FoodData Central. No value was estimated to fill a gap. The complete record, including foods that were left out and why, is on the sources page.

The figures are averages from published tables, and individual blood glucose responses vary. They are educational estimates, not medical or dietary advice. To add several foods together, use the calculator.