Hidden sugar: the 'healthy' Indian foods serving more than mithai

You quit soft drinks years ago. You order chai with 'no sugar.' You bought the granola because of the green leaf on the box, gave your child flavoured yogurt instead of ice cream, and switched to 'brown bread.' You did everything you were told — and your sugar intake may still be 60–80 grams a day.

This page is not about mithai or gulab jamun. Everyone knows those are sugar. This is about the sugar hiding inside foods sold as healthy: the breakfast granola that is a quarter sugar by weight, the 'fresh' juice carrying 22 grams in one glass, the fruit yogurt with four times the sugar of plain dahi. The food industry is two steps ahead of the careful shopper — and the FSSAI label is the one place the truth is actually written down.

• Who should read thisanyone buying 'healthy' packaged food, parents choosing kids' snacks, anyone with prediabetes auditing their diet.
• What you will learnwhy sugar by any name behaves the same in your body, the worst hidden-sugar offenders, and exactly how to read an Indian food label.
• What you will not geta 'never eat sugar again' lecture. This is about seeing clearly, not guilt.
• Time to read11 minutes.

Read this once. Every term on this page — and on your labels — starts here.

Added sugar vs natural sugar

Natural sugar comes inside whole fruit, milk and vegetables, locked in with fibre and water. Added sugar is anything put in during manufacture — table sugar, syrup, honey, jaggery, fruit concentrate. The WHO target is about 'free sugars': added sugar plus the sugar in juice and syrup.

Sucrose, glucose, fructose

The three sugar molecules. Table sugar (sucrose) is glucose + fructose joined together. Every cell in the body can burn glucose. Fructose is different.

Fructose and the liver

Fructose is processed almost only in the liver. In excess, the liver turns it into fat — a process called de novo lipogenesis. This is why fructose-heavy sweeteners (corn syrup, fruit juice, agave) push fatty liver and high triglycerides harder than glucose does.

Glycemic Index (GI)

How fast a food raises blood glucose, on a scale of 0–100. Surprisingly, jaggery's GI (~84) is higher than white sugar (~65) and honey (~58). 'Natural' does not mean 'gentle.'

FSSAI claim words

'Sugar free' = 0.5 g or less per 100 g. 'Low sugar' = 5 g or less per 100 g. 'No added sugar' means no sugar ingredient was added — but natural sugars can still be present, and the claim has been misused.

Your body runs one chemistry for every sugar — whether the label says honey, jaggery, date syrup or plain sucrose. Here is what happens after the first bite.

This is why a label cannot make sugar healthy. Trace minerals in jaggery or honey do not offset the metabolic load — one tablespoon of jaggery gives you about 2% of your daily iron and a full dose of sugar. The molecule does not read the front of the pack.

One teaspoon is about 4 grams of sugar. Here is what 'healthy' choices actually deliver; the WHO's gentler target is roughly 6 teaspoons of free sugar a day.

The label thresholds that matter'Low sugar' means 5 g or less per 100 g. If total sugar is above 10 g per 100 g, or sugar sits in the first three ingredients, treat it as a sweet — whatever the front says.

The Indian backdrop101 million Indians live with diabetes and 136 million more with prediabetes (ICMR-INDIAB, Lancet 2023). Hidden sugar is not a rounding error here.

Myth 1 — Honey and jaggery are safe for diabetes.

They raise blood glucose like any sugar. Jaggery's GI (~84) is actually higher than table sugar's (~65). Honey is about 82% sugar. The minerals are real but trivial in quantity.

Myth 2 — Fresh juice is a healthy breakfast.

Liquid sugar without fibre is a fast spike. A 250 ml orange juice has ~22 g sugar; a whole orange has 12 g plus fibre that slows it down. Whole fruit wins every time.

Myth 3 — Flavoured yogurt is a good snack for kids.

Fruit yogurt carries three to four times the sugar of plain dahi. The kid-friendly packaging is the point. Plain dahi plus chopped fruit at home does the same job without the sugar.

Myth 4 — 'Brown bread' is whole wheat.

Most is refined maida coloured with caramel, plus added sugar. Genuine whole wheat bread lists 'whole wheat flour' or 'atta' as the first ingredient, not 'wheat flour.'

Myth 5 — Granola is a weight-loss food.

Many commercial granolas are 25–40% sugar by weight. That is confectionery in cereal shape. Plain oats, nuts and seeds do the real job.

Myth 6 — 'No added sugar' guarantees no sugar.

Dates, fruit concentrate and honey are still sugar. FSSAI issued notices in 2024 over exactly this claim. Read the ingredients, not the front.

Myth 7 — Brown sugar and demerara are healthier.

They are white sugar with a little molasses. The metabolic load is the same.

Not a diet. A way to read what is already in your hand at the shop.

For parentsthe biggest hidden-sugar vectors for children are flavoured yogurt, fruit juice and 'kids' cereals. A home version — plain dahi with mango, a real fruit in the tiffin — removes several teaspoons a day with no fight.

Meet a careful eater. No mithai, no cola, no obvious junk. Watch the sugar add up anyway.

8:00 am — breakfast. A bowl of commercial granola (50 g) with flavoured yogurt (100 g). Granola 14 g + yogurt 15 g = 29 g, about 7 teaspoons. She thinks she ate oats and curd.

11:00 am — the 'healthy' drink. A 250 ml 'fresh' orange juice from the office café. 22 g, about 5.5 teaspoons. No fibre, straight spike.

1:30 pm — lunch. Home food, low sugar — but two tablespoons of ketchup on the side. 8 g, 2 teaspoons.

5:00 pm — the gym snack. One protein bar before the workout. 18 g, about 4.5 teaspoons, mostly from dates and glucose syrup.

Total before dinnerroughly 77 g of sugar — about 16 teaspoons — without a single sweet, biscuit or soft drink.

The WHO's gentler target is about 25 g a day. She is at three times that, and she would tell you honestly that she 'doesn't eat sugar.' This is the trap: the sugar was never on the front of any box. It was in the choices that felt like the responsible ones.

Step back and the pattern is clear. The problem is not that Indians lack willpower around sweets. It is that an entire category of processed food is engineered to read as healthy while carrying a sweet's worth of sugar — and the cultural trust we place in words like 'natural,' 'Ayurvedic' and 'farm-fresh' is exactly the lever the marketing uses.

This matters because the backdrop is 101 million Indians with diabetes and 136 million with prediabetes. In that context, the daily teaspoons hidden in 'health' foods are not a footnote — they are a meaningful share of the load, and the one part fully inside your control at the shelf.

The lesson is not fear and it is not a ban. It is literacy. The label is a contract: by law the truth is printed on the back, even when the front is a marketing poster. Learning to flip the packet, read the per-100-g number and spot a sugar alias is a five-second skill that compounds across every purchase, for years.

The long-term fix is policy — clearer front-of-pack warning labels, which FSSAI is slowly moving toward. Until that arrives, the shortcut is the same one that has always worked: eat food that does not need a health claim, because it never had a label to begin with.