Pick up a pack that doesn't look sweet, scan the ingredient list, and there it is: added sugar, listed two or three different ways, none of them spelled "sugar." It can feel like a trick. It isn't, really. By the end of this guide you'll recognise the most common names sugar hides behind on a label, and you'll know why a single product can name it several times over.
Why one product lists sugar several ways
Ingredients on a label are listed in order of weight, the heaviest first. So a maker who would rather sugar didn't sit at the top can split it into two or three different sugars instead of one. Each one weighs less on its own, so each lands further down the list — even though, added together, they might still outweigh everything else.
That's the whole reason a list like this is handy. Sugar isn't something to fear, and a bit of it won't undo your day — what matters is how much and how often it turns up across your whole diet, not any single pack. The point is simply to see it, so the choice is yours and not the label's.
The 12 names of added sugar to recognise
Here are the ones you'll actually meet, grouped so they're easier to hold in your head.
Syrups — usually liquid, and often near the top of sweet products:
- Glucose-fructose syrup (called high-fructose corn syrup in the US) — a cheap, very common sweetener in soft drinks, sauces and baked goods.
- Glucose syrup — milder-tasting; common in sweets, ice cream and energy bars.
- Invert sugar syrup — sugar split into glucose and fructose; keeps baked goods soft and moist.
- Agave syrup — marketed as natural, but it's mostly fructose; treat it like any other sugar.
- Rice syrup (brown rice syrup) — popular in healthy-looking snack bars, yet sugar all the same.
Concentrates — they sound like fruit and behave like sugar:
- Fruit juice concentrate — juice boiled down until it's mostly sugar. A handy way to sweeten a product while it still reads as "fruity" on the front.
The "-ose" family — a word ending in -ose is usually a sugar:
- Sucrose — plain table sugar, just under its chemical name.
- Dextrose — another word for glucose; turns up in processed and savoury foods too.
- Fructose — fruit sugar, also added on its own.
- Maltose — malt sugar, found in some cereals and baked goods.
- Lactose — milk sugar. Worth a note: this one is naturally in dairy, so seeing it in plain yoghurt or milk doesn't mean added sugar.
And a few that don't fit neatly anywhere:
- Molasses — the dark syrup left over from refining sugar; rich-tasting, but still sugar.
- Honey — natural and lovely, and counted as added sugar once it's poured into a product.
- Maltodextrin — technically a starch, not a sugar, but it's digested fast and behaves much like one, so it's worth spotting.
That's twelve added-sugar names plus a couple of honest exceptions: lactose, which belongs naturally in dairy, and maltodextrin, which isn't strictly sugar but acts like it. Together they're enough to read most labels with confidence. None of this makes a product "good" or "bad" on its own — it just tells you what's inside. If you'd like to keep building this label-reading habit, our guide to five additives worth knowing by name is a natural next step.
How Mira reads sugar on a label
You don't have to memorise all of this. When you scan a food product, Mira reads the label for you and shows a sugar gauge alongside salt, saturated fat and calories, then gives the product a transparency score from 0 to 100. That score is Mira's own opinion, offered to help you choose — not an absolute judgement of the product and not a claim about your health. It looks at one product in isolation, so what a given score means for you still depends on how much and how often you eat it, and on your diet and lifestyle overall. The method is built in the spirit of Nutri-Score and adapted per product type, so a sweet drink and a breakfast cereal are compared on fair terms rather than against each other — but it is Mira's own approach, not endorsed or approved by any health authority.
Mira stays independent, too: it doesn't take money for better ratings and shows no brand advertising. The database grows as people scan — so missing products get added and details get corrected over time.
A 10-second scan tip for tomorrow
Next time you're in the shop, do one small thing: read the ingredient list, not just the front of the pack. Count how many separate sweeteners from the list above you can spot. One is normal and nothing to worry about. Three or four clustered near the top quietly tells you the product is sweeter than it lets on — and now you can decide with your eyes open.