How many teaspoons of sugar in dried mixed fruit?

Dried mixed fruit, as sold for baking in the UK, is usually a blend of sultanas, raisins and currants, sometimes with candied citrus peel. It is not on any of Dr Unwin’s charts. Its figure comes from Table 1 of the 2016 paper by Unwin, Haslam and Livesey, which gives the full working for sixteen standard portions.

Every input is printed. Table 1 lists a glycaemic index of 60, 41g of available carbohydrate in a 60g portion, a glycaemic load of 24 and a teaspoon figure of 9.0. The arithmetic below uses those values directly.

Available carbohydrate is the carbohydrate the body can digest and absorb, expressed in UK food tables as the weight of the equivalent simple sugars. It leaves out fibre. In dried fruit, nearly all of it is sugar.

The portion is 60g, about a third of a cup. The fresh fruits on the fruits chart are weighed at 120g, so the portions on the two sources differ by a factor of two.

Recipes that use mixed fruit, such as fruit cake, scones and malt loaf, combine it with flour and sugar, so the figure for the dried fruit alone does not describe the baked result. Malt loaf has its own figure from the sugar burden chart.

Table 1 does not name the fruits in its mix, and supermarket blends vary in their proportions of each.