Sources

Attribution

The teaspoon-of-sugar method and nearly every food value on this site are the work of Dr David Unwin, a general practitioner at Norwood Surgery in Southport, England, and his co-authors Dr David Haslam and Dr Geoffrey Livesey. The paper credits Dr Livesey with the calculations that produce the teaspoon equivalents.

The method is published as: Unwin D, Haslam D, Livesey G. It is the glycaemic response to, not the carbohydrate content of food that matters in diabetes and obesity: The glycaemic index revisited. Journal of Insulin Resistance. 2016;1(1):a8. DOI: 10.4102/jir.v1i1.8. The journal now publishes as the Journal of Metabolic Health, and the article is available at journalofmetabolichealth.org.

The sugar infographics are distributed free by the Public Health Collaboration, a UK registered charity, at phcuk.org/sugar, where they are also available in more than 40 translations.

Licence and permission to reuse

This site reproduces numerical values from the infographics and the paper. It does not reproduce the infographic images. Three different kinds of permission bear on that material, and they are not the same thing. Each is set out separately below, as checked when this page was built.

What is formally licensed

The Journal of Insulin Resistance (Journal of Metabolic Health) states that all its articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) unless otherwise stated. The licence field on this article's own page reads "Other", so this site could not confirm that the 2016 paper itself carries CC BY 4.0. The article is © 2016 David Unwin, David Haslam and Geoffrey Livesey. As a precaution, the values are attributed here in the form CC BY 4.0 requires: the work, its authors and its source are named above, and the changes made are listed below.

What the author has stated publicly

On 26 May 2021, Dr Unwin posted a seven-part thread on X from his account @lowcarbGP introducing the sugar infographics. The first post links to phcuk.org/sugar and describes the charts as "Freely available". The second post reads, in part:

"The 7 sugar infographics are now available in 14 languages and no copyright, so please use freely."

This is a public statement by the author on social media. It is not a formal licence: it names no licence terms, it refers to the seven charts published at that date, and it is not a statement by the Public Health Collaboration, which distributes the charts, or by the journal. This site records it for completeness and does not rely on it for any claim made elsewhere on the site.

What is neither

The Public Health Collaboration's sugar page offers the infographics as free downloads. No licence statement was found on that page; its footer reads © Public Health Collaboration. Any chart added to the set after May 2021 is not covered by the statement above, and no licence for it was found.

Changes made: values are shown to one decimal place; portion descriptions have been expanded with US-recognisable measures alongside the published gram weights; foods from several charts have been combined into one list and sorted into categories; where charts disagree, one value is used and the other is recorded below.

This site is independent. It is not affiliated with, reviewed by or endorsed by Dr Unwin, his co-authors, the Public Health Collaboration or the journal.

How each value was produced

Every food carries one of three derivation labels:

• Read from infographic (59 foods): the teaspoon figure is printed on one of Dr Unwin's charts and was copied as printed.
• Published GL table (7 foods): the teaspoon figure is printed in Table 1 of the 2016 paper, which also gives GI, carbohydrate and glycaemic load.
• Calculated from GI and carb content (3 foods): chicken, salmon and beef. USDA FoodData Central lists 0.0g carbohydrate per 100g for each, so the glycaemic load is 0 whatever GI is assumed.

Where a chart prints a teaspoon figure but no glycaemic load, the GL column below was back-calculated as teaspoons × 2.73, the glycaemic load of one teaspoon of table sugar given in the paper. Those rows say so in their notes. The teaspoon figure is always the published one.

Sources last verified: 2026-09-13.

Where the published sources disagree

The charts were drawn at different times from different table entries, and a few figures do not match from one chart to the next. None of these has been adjusted. The value used, and the other value, are recorded here.

• Banana, 120g: 5.9 on the fruits chart (used); 5.7 on the common foods and fruits vs vegetables charts.
• Apple, 120g: 2.2 on the fruits chart (used); 2.3 on the common foods chart and in Table 1 of the paper.
• Brown or wholemeal bread, 30g slice: 3.3 on the bread chart (used); 3.0 on the common foods chart.
• Cornflakes, 30g: 8.4 on the breakfast cereals chart (used); 8.5 in Table 1.
• Bran flakes, 30g: both give 3.7, but the chart lists GI 74 and Table 1 lists GI 50.
• Broccoli: 0.2 for 80g on the common foods chart (used); 0.1 for 250g on the white, brown or green chart.
• Apple juice: 4.0 for 200ml on the healthy breakfast chart (used); 4.3 per 100ml on the sugar burden chart, which would be 8.6 for 200ml.
• Bread, two slices (60g): the white, brown or green chart gives 8 (white) and 6 (brown), which are not exactly double the single-slice figures of 3.7 and 3.3. The calculator uses the single-slice chart.
• Cauliflower, tomato and mushrooms (Table 1): the printed glycaemic load column (0.32, 0.24, 0.03) does not equal GI × carbohydrate ÷ 100 (1.9, 0.9, 0.2), but the printed teaspoon figures match the calculated loads. The teaspoon figures are used as printed, and the GL column here holds the calculated load.

Foods left out

These appear on the charts or were considered, and were not included.

• Couscous (Table 1): listed as 150g rehydrated with 14g of available carbohydrate and 3.3 teaspoons. That carbohydrate figure is well below typical values for cooked couscous, and the discrepancy could not be resolved from the paper.
• Fizzy orange, skimmed milk and apple juice per 100ml (sugar burden chart): the drink figures on this chart are not consistent with the other charts, so none of them is used.
• Chocolate: the chocolate chart counts grams of sugar per bar, not glycaemic load, so its figures are a different measure.
• Beans and pulses chart: found only in translated sets. The Public Health Collaboration notes that translations have not been independently verified.
• Cheese, nuts, olive oil, spinach, salad leaves, courgette and similar: the charts list these as very low glycaemic foods but print no figure for them.
• Duplicates: foods that appear on more than one chart with the same portion are listed once.

No foods were added from other GI tables. The Harvard Health GI and GL list sits behind a subscription wall, and the online appendix of the 2008 international tables could not be retrieved, so neither was used as a direct source.

Reference list