Finding hidden sugar

In my last blog we looked at how to read food labels, looking at the sugar and fat using the 100g column.
It is also helpful to look at the sugar in the per serve column for some foods. It is useful to know that 1 teaspoon of sugar weighs 4 grams.
If you look at sugar per serve below, you can see that a Nescafe cappuccino sachet has almost 1.5 teaspoons (5.5g) of sugar per cup. This surprised me as people may also add their own sugar to this coffee, not realising that it already contains sugar.

The Ingredient list also gives us clues about about how much sugar is in food. Ingredients are listed in descending order. In the regular coffee sachet, glucose syrup (a type of sugar) and sugar are listed as third and fourth in the ingredient list.
In the Butterscotch sachet below you can see that sugar is listed as the first ingredient in this sachet, which means it is the most prominent ingredient, before even coffee! 

The sweet coffee sachet below has more sugar at almost 2 teaspoons per cup.

The skim sachet has the same sugar as the regular sachet, almost 1.5 teaspoons per cup, but also has less fat than the regular sachet.

Finally, the butterscotch latte sachet below has nearly 3 teaspoons of sugar per cup, with sugar is listed as the first ingredient.
Knowing how to spot the sugar in food helps us make informed decisions about what to eat and drink.