How many teaspoons of sugar in an apple?

The apple on Dr Unwin’s fruits chart is a Golden Delicious, weighed at 120g, which is a small apple. A typical supermarket apple is often larger, and the figure rises with the weight.

The chart gives a glycaemic index of 39, in the band conventionally called low, which runs up to 55. A large part of the sugar in apples is fructose, which has little direct effect on blood glucose, and whole apples contain pectin, a soluble fibre.

Three sources give a figure for the same 120g apple. The fruits chart prints a glycaemic load of 6 and 2.2 teaspoons, the value used here. The common foods chart and Table 1 of the 2016 paper give 2.3. Table 1 also lists 16g of available carbohydrate. At GI 39 that is a load of 6.24, which divides to 2.3, while the fruits chart’s rounded load of 6 divides to 2.2. The arithmetic points to rounding as the source of the difference, which is recorded on the sources page. The site’s explainer what is glycaemic load uses the Table 1 version as a worked example.

Variety matters for apples. Tart cooking apples, sweet dessert apples and older heritage varieties differ in their sugars and acids, and the GI tables list several apples with different values. This row describes Golden Delicious only.

Apple juice, made from the same fruit without its pulp and skin, is on a different chart and has its own page: apple juice.