What Is The Recommended Daily Sugar Intake For Kids?

Written and clinically reviewed by Bahee Van de Bor, RD, BCAPSc PGDipDiet, Specialist Paediatric Dietitian.

Published 3 March 2019. Reviewed and updated 31 July 2026.

If you have searched for this, you probably want a number.

Here it is, and then here is the part that actually helps, because the number on its own is almost impossible to use.

Free sugars are not listed on a UK food label. Total sugars are.

So a parent standing in a supermarket has no way of telling, from the packet, how much of what they are holding counts towards that daily limit.

That’s the real problem. Not willpower, and not information.

The label doesn’t tell you.

So let me show you what I do instead.

What counts as a free sugar?

Free sugars are the ones the guideline is about.

That means any sugar added to food or drink by a manufacturer, a cook or you.

It also includes honey, syrups such as maple, date and agave, and the sugars in fruit juice and smoothies.

Coconut sugar counts.

Date syrup counts.

So does the honey in a “no refined sugar” flapjack.

There is a persistent idea that these are gentler alternatives.

They are not.

Your child would need to eat kilos of coconut sugar to get a meaningful amount of the minerals it is marketed on, and the sugar arrives long before the minerals do.

Does the sugar in fruit and milk count?

No, and this is the distinction that trips most people up.

The sugars inside a whole apple, or in a glass of milk, are not free sugars.

They come packaged with fibre, water, protein or calcium, and a child has to do some work to eat them.

Whole fruit and milk stay exactly where they are.

It changes when the structure breaks down.

Juicing, blending and pureeing release those sugars, which is why fruit juice and smoothies count as free sugars even when nothing has been added.

Dried fruit sits slightly differently. Its naturally occurring sugars are not classed as free sugars, but it is sticky and concentrated, so it is kinder to teeth as part of a meal rather than on its own between meals.

How to read the sugar on a UK food label

Here’s the part most parents never get told.

A UK label shows total sugars.

That is the free sugars and the naturally occurring ones added together, with no way to separate them.

Plain natural yoghurt looks like it contains around 5g of sugar per 100g, and every gram of that is lactose, which was never the problem.

So you cannot read free sugars off a packet. Nobody can.

What you can do is compare, and use a threshold that already accounts for the natural sugars.

For yoghurts and fromage frais, I use 10g of total sugar per 100g as the ceiling.

Plain yoghurt usually contains around 5g of naturally occurring lactose per 100g, so using 10g as a practical ceiling leaves some room for added sugar without asking you to calculate something the label cannot tell you.

Try it in the chiller aisle and you will find how few products marketed at children clear it.

Then use the ingredients list as a second check.

Ingredients are listed in order of weight, so a sugar near the top tells you it is a major component.

Just don’t try to turn that into a number, because a product can carry three differently named sugars further down the list and no position tells you the grams.

Then use the ingredients list as a second check, and this is the rule I teach parents.

Ingredients are listed in order of weight, so if a sugar appears in the first three, it is one of the main things in the packet.

That is usually all you need to know, and it takes about two seconds.

Just be aware that a product can also carry two or three differently named sugars further down the list, which together add up to more than their individual positions suggest.

Where the sugar is actually coming from

Not where most parents think.

In the UK national diet survey, the largest overall source for children is cereals and cereal products, and that means cakes, pastries, sweet biscuits and breakfast cereals rather than bread or oats.

Fruit juice and smoothies contribute another 15 per cent among four to ten year olds.

Sweets and chocolate are a much smaller part of the picture than their reputation suggests.

Which is why the limit gets passed on an entirely ordinary day, in a house where nobody has eaten a single sweet.

A sweetened cereal at breakfast, a fruit yoghurt in the lunchbox, juice with dinner, a biscuit after school.

None of it looks like sugar, and all of it can count.

Do I need to count my child’s sugar?

No.

Please don’t. Weighing and tracking a child’s food changes the atmosphere at the table, and that costs you more than the sugar does.

Simple ways to lower free sugars without banning anything

Start with drinks, because that is usually the easiest change in the house and it needs no negotiation at the table.

Water and milk most days. Juice as a thing that happens sometimes, rather than the default that appears at every meal.

Then look at the foods that show up daily rather than the ones that show up at parties.

A cereal swapped once is a change that lasts all year. A biscuit refused on a Tuesday is a row.

Compare two brands of the same thing, using the 10g per 100g rule for yoghurts and the ingredients list for everything else. Choose the better one, put it in the trolley, and stop thinking about it.

And leave sweet foods in the diet. A child who is allowed a biscuit does not need to become interested in biscuits.

Should you buy sugar-free snacks?

No. Products marketed as sugar-free are rarely the improvement they appear to be.

Parents often tell me that their child gets bored with simple snacks, or that fruit alone does not fill them up.

That is fair. It just means fruit needs a companion—not that you need to buy a special sugar-free product.

Try pairing fruit with one of these:

• Plain popcorn
• An oatcake or wholegrain cracker
• A small sandwich
• Wholegrain toast with hummus or tahini
• Rice cakes or corn thins with nut butter
• Plain or Greek-style yoghurt
• Cheese with oatcakes
• A small egg sandwich
• Vegetables with hummus or a nut-based dip
• A calcium-fortified plant-based yoghurt or pudding if your child avoids dairy

Fresh fruit and tinned fruit in juice, drained, are both useful options.

The aim is not to make every snack sugar-free.

It is to choose satisfying everyday foods that are not automatically sweet, while allowing biscuits, cakes and other sweet foods to remain a relaxed part of family life.

Focus on the snacks your child eats every day and use the label checks above to compare similar products.

There is no need to police every gram of sugar.

Why almost no child is inside the limit

Only 8 per cent of UK children aged four to ten meet the recommendation for free sugars.

Eight per cent.

I want to be careful with that number, because it is easy to hear as an accusation. It isn’t one. When 92 per cent of children sit outside a guideline, that is not 92 per cent of parents getting it wrong.

It is a food environment. The sugar is in the products marketed at children, the standards for reformulating those products are still voluntary, and no label tells you which of the sugars in front of you actually counts.

You are doing the best you can inside a system that is not set up to help you. Change the drinks, screen the yoghurts, and let the rest go.

Talk to a paediatric dietitian

If your child has tummy pain, constipation, loose stools or IBS-type symptoms and you have run out of things to try, that is what I do all day.

Book a free Discovery Call and we can talk about whether the Happy Belly Club® is the right fit.

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