Sugar in Drinks Calculator
Tap the drinks you'd have in a day and see the total sugar in grams, teaspoons, and sugar cubes — plus how much of the WHO daily limit your drinks alone use up.
Tap drinks to add them
Label-typical sugar per servingToday's drinks
- Regular cola330 ml can135 g
Past the 25 g ideal, still under the 50 g ceiling.
Sugar values are label-typical per serving — brands vary, so check your label. Limits are the WHO free-sugar guideline at 2,000 kcal (5% ideal / 10% ceiling); estimates, not medical advice. Log today's drinks in the tracker →
Why drinks are the fastest way to blow a sugar budget
Drinks are the single biggest source of added sugar in most diets — and the easiest to underestimate, because liquid sugar doesn't trigger fullness the way food does. You can drink 35 g of sugar in two minutes and feel exactly as hungry as before. The average US adult takes in around 17 teaspoons of added sugar a day (roughly 68–70 g), and sugary drinks are the largest contributor.
The scale of it surprises people. The WHO's ideal daily target for free sugars is 25 g (5% of a 2,000 kcal diet), with a ceiling of 50 g (10%). Against those numbers:
- One 330 ml can of cola ≈ 35 g — 140% of the ideal in one can.
- One 250 ml energy drink ≈ 27 g — the whole ideal, plus change.
- A morning orange juice (≈21 g) and an afternoon sweetened iced tea (≈22 g) ≈ 43 g — near the ceiling from two "innocent" drinks.
The UK's front-of-pack traffic-light system makes the same point: for drinks, anything over 11.25 g of sugar per 100 ml is red — regular cola, at about 10.6 g/100 ml, sits just under that line in the high-amber band, and many smoothies and juices land amber or red as well. Green is reserved for drinks at or under 2.5 g/100 ml, which in practice means water, plain tea and coffee, and little else.
How to read your result
The values here are label-typical figures per standard serving — brands vary, so check your own can's "of which sugars" line for exact numbers. Milk-based drinks (lattes, chocolate milk) include some naturally occurring lactose in their label totals, so their free-sugar content is a little lower than the printed figure. And remember this tool only counts your drinks: whatever percentage of the limit you see, food hasn't been added yet.
If one drink dominates your total, that's your highest-leverage change — the Sugar Swap Finder will show what switching it saves in grams per week, and if soda is the culprit, the Quit Soda Savings Calculator puts a money figure on it. Then make the number visible daily: theSugar Intake Tracker app on our homepage logs drinks in seconds and shows each day against your limit. These figures are guideline-based estimates for healthy adults, not medical advice.
Frequently asked questions
How much sugar is in a can of cola?+
A regular 330 ml can of cola contains about 35 g of sugar — roughly 8 teaspoons or 9 sugar cubes. That single can is already past the WHO ideal daily target of 25 g of free sugars, and uses 70% of the 50 g ceiling, before you've eaten anything.
Is fruit juice better than soda for sugar?+
Not by much on sugar alone. A 250 ml glass of orange juice has about 21 g of sugar — comparable to many soft drinks — and the WHO counts juice sugars as free sugars even with nothing added, because juicing strips the fruit's fibre. Whole fruit is the exception: its sugar comes packaged with fibre and doesn't count toward the free-sugar limit.
Do diet drinks count toward my sugar limit?+
No. Diet and zero-sugar sodas are sweetened with non-nutritive sweeteners and typically contain 0 g of sugar, so they add nothing to your free-sugar total. Whether sweeteners are a good long-term habit is a separate debate, but for this calculator they count as zero.
Does beer have sugar in it?+
A standard lager typically has close to 0 g of sugar — the brewing yeast ferments the sugars into alcohol. Its calories come from the alcohol itself, not sugar. Sweetened beers, ciders, and cocktails are different: cider and mixed drinks can carry 15–30 g of sugar per serving.
How accurate are the sugar values in this calculator?+
They're label-typical figures for a standard serving of each category — real products vary by brand, country, and recipe, sometimes by a lot. Treat every result as a guideline-based estimate and check the 'of which sugars' line on your own bottle or can for the exact number.
How much sugar per day is OK in total?+
The WHO recommends keeping free sugars under 10% of daily calories — about 50 g on a 2,000 kcal diet — and ideally under 5%, about 25 g. This is general population guidance, not medical advice: if you have diabetes or another condition affected by sugar, follow your clinician's individual targets instead.
Now track it daily
Knowing the number is step one — seeing it every day is what changes it. Sugar Intake Tracker, our iOS app in development, logs added sugar from a photo of your food: snap it, confirm the AI estimate, done.
Meet the appAI estimate · You confirm · Your log stays on your device