Label Reading: The Snickers Sugar Metric

Nutritional labels give us the raw facts but they can make it hard to put things in perspective. What exactly is 16g of sugar? Is that a bad thing?

I like to compare labels with a known junk food to get perspective. For sugars my favorite is a Snickers Bar. I think most people will agree a Snickers bar is candy and not an acceptable breakfast or healthy snack. (I’m not arguing it can’t ever be a snack or treat just that it’s not a healthy one.)

So what does a Snicker bar look like from a sugar point of view? According to the nutritional information on amazon a Snickers bar contains 280 calories and 30g of sugar. (For the curious 4.2 grams of sugar equal 1 teaspoon so a Snickers bar contains a little over 7 teaspoons of sugar.)

The main problem with comparing this information to other products is the serving size and calorie counts differ. Take for example a product marketed as a healthy breakfast to go, Cheerios Honey Nut , Milk ‘n Cereal Bars. According to it’s nutritional information on amazon a Milk ‘n Cereal Bar contains 160 calories and 16g of sugar. At first glance that’s a lot less then the 30g in a snickers. However if you look at the calories the Milk ‘n Cereal bar contains a lot less “food” as well.

To fairly compare the sugar levels you have to compare sugar for the same number of calories. To make the change first we need to calculate the grams of sugar per calorie for the Snickers. I switched that to grams per 10 calories because it will make the math for comparing it to other products a lot easier. (I’m assuming you want math you can do in your head while standing in a supermarket. In my case math I can do in my head while I child is half hanging out of the grocery cart screaming “MOMMY YOU ARE STARVING ME!!!!”)

(Total grams sugar / Total calories) * 10cal = grams per 10cal

Snickers: (30g / 280cal) * 10cal = 1.07g per 10cal

For easy super market math this can be rounded to a Snickers containing 1g of sugar per 10 calories. To figure out how much sugar would be in a Snickers with the same number of calories as the target food divide the calories by 10 and multiply by 1 or to make it simple just drop the 0 off the number of calories.

For example let’s go back to the Milk ‘n Cereal bar that’s 160 calories and 16g of sugar. An equivalent Snickers bar with 160 calories would also have 16g of sugar. Suddenly instead of looking like the healthy breakfast it’s advertised to be it becomes a vitamin fortified Snickers bar.

Here are a couple other foods compared:

Product	Calories	Sugar	Sugar in Snickers
Nature’s Path Organic Flax Plus Pumpkin Granola	140 cal	5 g	14g
Annies Organic Tropical Treat Bunny Fruit Snacks	70 cal	10 g	7 g
Quaker Instant Oatmeal Apples & Cinnamon	130 cal	11 g	13 g
Horizon Organic Reduced Fat Milk, Chocolate	180 cal	27 g	18 g

These show some interesting results. The granola has a lot less sugar then an equivalent Snickers. However the Oatmeal is almost as bad. What shocked me was the nice “healthy” organic products (Fruit Snacks & Chocolate Milk) had significantly MORE sugar then an equivalent Snickers bar! I knew chocolate milk could have a lot of sugar but I never realized it was worse then even a Snicker!

Now while running these comparisons there are a couple of warnings to keep in mind. The first is even though something has less sugar then a Snickers that doesn’t make it healthy. I use Snickers as the obvious junk food line. If something hits the Snickers point it is really really sweet. Even at less then Snickers the granola is still over a teaspoon of sugar poured on 1/2 cup of food.

The second is that this comparison only works on processed foods where the sugar comes from refined sources like sugar, syrup, juice concentrate, etc. The comparison can make some very healthy whole foods look really bad for you. Take for example an apple with 65 calories and 14 g of sugar. An equivalent Snickers would have only 6.5 g of sugar. That looks a lot healthier if we just compare the numbers. However “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Apples have all their sugar tied up with fiber, vitamins, minerals, macro nutrients we haven’t even discovered, etc. In that form the sugar is given to the body in a form it is used to absorbing with a ton of other things it needs. If we took the apple, pressed out and filtered the juice leaving the fiber and a lot of nutrients behind, concentrated the pure juice and then used it as sweetener then we’re talking pure candy again.

So next time you are walking down the grocery store or staring into your pantry try this little experiment. Glance at the label and drop the last digit off the number of calories. If the number of grams of sugar in the product is close to or greater then that number be warned. You have a Snickers in disguise.

So what foods did you find that turn out to be surprisingly sweet? Share them in the comments.

(All amazon links are affiliate links. However I do NOT recommend buying the products I link to on this post.)