According to the American Heart Association, the amount of sugar in just one can of Coke is more sugar than an average man or woman should ingest in a day.
A coke has 10 teaspoons of sugar in it. A teaspoon of sugar has 4 grams of sugar in it, so a coke has about 40 grams of sugar in it.
Added sugar is associated with obesity, heart disease and diabetes. You can use food labels to compare products and choose foods that are lower in added sugars. Read the nutrition facts table to see how many sugars are in a food, and then look at the ingredient list to see whether those sugars are naturally occurring, or have been added. Vegetables, fruits, and milk products contain naturally occurring sugars, so it is important to cross reference with the ingredient list to see what the source of the sugar is.
On the ingredient list, watch for words that end in “ose” such as glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, dextrose and galactose. Remember that ingredients are listed by weight from most to least, and different kinds of sugars count as different ingredients allowing savvy food producers to split up the weight of the sugars and list them lower on the list.
Other names for added sugars include corn syrup, honey, molasses, liquid sugar, and raw sugar. Be aware that manufacturers are using fruit juice as a sweetener. Grape juice concentrate and apple juice concentrate are made by cooking down the juices of the fruits until all that is left are the sugars. While these sugars are naturally occurring, they are far from in their natural state and behave just like other added sugars.
