How many teaspoons of sugar in apple juice?

The apple juice on Dr Unwin’s charts is described as pure: juice pressed from apples with nothing added, as opposed to apple drinks with added sugar and water. The portion is a 200ml glass.

The figure used here comes from the chart titled “A healthy breakfast: cereals, toast, fruit juice?”. That chart builds a breakfast from four items, a 30g bowl of bran flakes, 125ml of milk, a slice of brown toast and a 200ml glass of pure apple juice, and prints a total for the breakfast of 11.7 teaspoons. The juice’s figure is printed as a whole number, 4.

A second chart does not agree. The sugar burden chart lists apple juice in its column of naturally occurring sugars at 4.3 teaspoons per 100ml. For a 200ml glass, that would be 8.6. Neither chart explains its figure, and neither prints the GI or carbohydrate content it used. The breakfast chart’s value is used on this site because the sugar burden chart’s drink figures disagree with the other charts in several places. The conflict is listed on the sources page.

Neither chart prints a glycaemic index or glycaemic load, so the load on this page was back-calculated from the breakfast chart’s figure.

Apple juice contains the sugars of the fruit, mainly fructose, glucose and sucrose, without the pulp and skin. Cloudy juice keeps a little more of the fruit’s solids than clear juice, which is filtered.

The whole fruit, measured on the fruits chart at 120g, is on the apple page.