Jaggery vs sugar is an argument most Indian kitchens settled years ago. Gur is the healthy one. Your nani said so, and the mithai shop agrees.
The numbers disagree. Jaggery is a little less refined and carries a few minerals, but it's still sugar. It lands in your blood at least as fast, and the iron is too small to matter at any amount you'd sensibly eat.
Jaggery vs sugar: is jaggery better?
Only slightly, and not in any way your body will notice: India's food regulator requires cane jaggery to be at least 90% sugar by dry weight. Its glycaemic index is no lower than white sugar's (a 2025 review puts it higher), and its minerals are real but tiny. Treat jaggery as sugar with better flavour.
That last part matters. If you put gur in your chai because you like how it tastes, that's a perfectly good reason to keep doing it. The health reasons are thinner, and the rest of this page goes through them one by one.
What is jaggery actually made of?
Jaggery is sugarcane juice boiled down until it sets, without spinning off the molasses the way a refinery does, so it keeps some minerals and its brown colour. FSSAI's standard for cane jaggery sets a floor of 70% sucrose and 90% total sugars on a dry-weight basis. By legal definition, gur is sugar.
White sugar is close to 100% sucrose. Jaggery trades a few of those points for glucose and fructose (the same FSSAI standard allows up to 20% reducing sugars), a little moisture and a few percent of minerals.
That's the whole difference. A spoon of jaggery is roughly nine-tenths of a spoon of sugar, plus flavour.
Does jaggery raise blood sugar less than sugar?
No, and it may raise it more: white sugar's glycaemic index is 65, from the international GI tables published in Diabetes Care in 2008. A 2025 review by Veerbhan and Malik puts jaggery at 84. The two top-ranking Indian jaggery pages we checked list it at 65 and about 70, with no source for either.
Jaggery varies from batch to batch and cane to cane, so I'd treat any single GI figure for it as rough. I read the 84 as a warning sign with wide error bars.
What none of the evidence supports is the idea that jaggery is gentler on your blood sugar. Gram for gram, it's carbohydrate your body absorbs like sugar, because mostly it is sugar.
Is jaggery a good source of iron?
Not at any amount you'd want to eat. A 2022 review in Agricultural Reviews puts jaggery at roughly 10 to 13 mg of iron per 100 g, so a heaped teaspoon (about 10 g) gives you around 1 mg. ICMR-NIN puts an adult woman's daily iron requirement at 29 mg, and a man's at 19 mg.
Run that the other way. To get a full day's iron from jaggery, a woman would need about 260 g of it, which is roughly 1,000 calories of sugar. That's more than 10 times the 20 to 25 g of sugar a day that ICMR-NIN's 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians allow.
And part of that iron didn't come from the cane. The same review notes iron leaching from the pans jaggery is boiled in, which is also what darkens it.
If your iron is low, dal, rajma, chana and leafy greens will do far more than gur ever can, without the sugar riding along.
Does jaggery have fewer calories than sugar?
Barely: jaggery comes in at around 380 calories per 100 g against white sugar's 387, because a small share of its weight is water and minerals. Spoon for spoon, you won't be able to measure the gap. Swap sugar for jaggery to cut calories and you've cut about 1%.
Weight loss is the claim that sticks to jaggery most often, and it has the least behind it. Jaggery's calories match sugar's almost exactly, so whatever it does for your waistline, sugar would do too.
Does jaggery clean your lungs?
There's one study behind this claim, and it was in rats: in 1994, Sahu and Saxena put coal dust straight into rats' lungs and fed some of them jaggery. The jaggery group moved more dust out to the lymph nodes and showed less lung damage. We couldn't find a human trial that has tested it since.
The study is real and you can read it in Environmental Health Perspectives. The rats got 0.5 g of jaggery a day, 5 days a week, for 90 days. A lab rat weighs a few hundred grams, so scaled crudely to a 60 kg adult, that's somewhere north of 100 g of jaggery a day.
When Business Standard asked a pulmonologist about it, he knew of no human study either. So it's a decent reason for someone to run a trial. It's a thin reason to eat gur after a smoggy week in Delhi.
Is jaggery safe for diabetics?
Treat it exactly like sugar, because your glucose meter will. Jaggery is mostly sucrose, its glycaemic index is no lower, and under the WHO's definition it counts as a free sugar the moment you stir it into anything. Swapping sugar for gur in your chai changes the colour of the cup and very little on the meter.
You already know how to manage your numbers. The trouble with gur is the halo: it feels like a free pass, so it gets eaten like one. That's how a teaspoon becomes three.
Watch for it on mithai boxes too, where "made with jaggery, no sugar" is a sentence about which sugar went in. A sweet made with gur can't meet the per-100 g threshold for a sugar-free claim in India, and it would be odd if it could. If you want the full list of what actually works for a diabetic, start with our guide to sweeteners that hold up against a meter.
Where does jaggery actually win?
On flavour, and on being less processed: gur tastes of molasses and woodsmoke, which white sugar never will. Those are good reasons to choose it for til ladoo or a winter chikki. Choose it for that, in sugar-sized amounts, and you get exactly what you paid for.
Chikki is also where jaggery does something no zero-sugar sweetener can, ours included. It needs real sugar to set and snap, and allulose won't do that job. We've written up which Indian sweets allulose handles and which it can't set, and chikki sits firmly on the second list.
What should you use instead of jaggery or sugar?
If the goal is sweetness without the sugar, use something that isn't sugar. A monk fruit and allulose blend sweetens without sucrose. Allulose is a rare sugar the human body doesn't metabolise, and in human trials it lowered the rise in blood glucose after a meal.
The evidence is specific. A 2023 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE (Tani and colleagues, 8 experiments) found 5 g and 10 g doses of allulose cut the post-meal glucose curve by roughly 13 to 14% in healthy adults, with diabetics deliberately left out. A 2024 meta-analysis in Metabolism Open (Ayesh and colleagues, 6 trials, 126 people with type 2 diabetes) found better post-meal glucose, with no change in fasting glucose.
Published estimates put allulose at 0.2 to 0.4 calories per gram against sugar's 4. The FDA tells US labels to use 0.4, the top of the range. So the zero on our pack is a rounded number, and every zero-calorie sweetener in the category reaches it the same way.
Monk fruit carries the sweetness and allulose does the bulk, so the blend dissolves like sugar in a hot cup of chai. Allulose also browns faster than sugar does when heated (Ertugrul and colleagues found it browned more than fructose or glucose), so bakes made with it colour faster. You can read how allulose works in the body in more detail.
Two concessions. It won't taste like gur, so if gur's flavour is the point, keep the gur and count it.
And it costs more than either jaggery or sugar, because monk fruit and allulose cost more to make. A small number of people also find it a touch less sweet than they expected, so start with a teaspoon and adjust up.
If chai is where most of your sugar goes, here's what sugar-free chai takes, cup by cup. And if you'd like to try the blend itself, Beyond The Sugar's monk fruit and allulose sweetener comes in 150 g pouches and 5 g sachets.
Love gur for what it is. Just count it like sugar.
Frequently asked questions
Is jaggery good for weight loss?
No. Jaggery has around 380 calories per 100 g against white sugar's 387, so swapping one for the other cuts calories by about 1%. Any weight you lose after the switch came from eating less sweet food overall.
Is palm jaggery or coconut jaggery better than cane jaggery?
They come from different sap, but they're still mostly sugar. Some pages quote lower glycaemic index figures for palm jaggery, but we couldn't find a published measurement behind them. Until one exists, count palm and coconut jaggery the way you'd count sugar.
Does jaggery count as added sugar?
Yes, in every sense that matters. The WHO defines free sugars as sugars added to food by the manufacturer, the cook or the person eating it, so jaggery stirred into chai counts. It belongs inside ICMR-NIN's 20 to 25 g a day for adults, alongside white sugar.
How much jaggery a day is okay?
Count it inside the same 20 to 25 g a day that ICMR-NIN sets for all sugar. That's about 2 heaped teaspoons, and it covers everything, from the sugar in your chai to whatever's in the biscuits.
Is eating jaggery after meals good for digestion?
It's a lovely habit with a long tradition behind it, but we couldn't find a human trial showing jaggery helps digestion. If you enjoy a small piece after a meal, enjoy it, and count it as the sugar it is.
Can diabetics have jaggery in chai?
In the same amounts you'd have sugar, and with the same caution. Jaggery's glycaemic index is no lower than sugar's, so a cup sweetened with gur will show up on your meter much like one sweetened with sugar. Test your own response if you want certainty.
Sources
FSSAI, Food Products Standards, Chapter 2.8.4, Gur or Jaggery: cane jaggery, minimum 70% sucrose and 90% total sugars on a dry-weight basis, maximum 20% reducing sugars. fssai.gov.in
Atkinson, Foster-Powell and Brand-Miller, "International tables of glycemic index and glycemic load values: 2008", Diabetes Care, 2008, 31(12): sucrose GI 65 ± 4. PMC2584181
Veerbhan and Malik, "The health halo of jaggery: benefits beyond sugar, but a high glycemic index risk", Magna Scientia Advanced Research and Reviews, 2025, 14(2), 085-095. DOI 10.30574/msarr.2025.14.2.0093
Selvi, Mathialagan and Mohan, "The art and science of jaggery making: a review", Agricultural Reviews, 2022, 43(4), 401-409. DOI 10.18805/ag.R-2138
ICMR-NIN, Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024: added sugar under 5% of energy, 20 to 25 g a day for adults. ICMR-NIN, Nutrient Requirements for Indians, 2020: iron RDA 19 mg (men), 29 mg (women).
Sahu and Saxena, "Enhanced translocation of particles from lungs by jaggery", Environmental Health Perspectives, 1994, 102(Suppl 5), 211-214. PMC1567304
World Health Organization, Guideline: Sugars intake for adults and children, 2015: definition of free sugars.
Tani et al., PLOS ONE, 2023, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0281150; Ayesh et al., "Impact of allulose on blood glucose in type 2 diabetes: a meta-analysis of clinical trials", Metabolism Open, 2024, PMID 39583955; Ahmed et al., "Rare sugars and their health effects in humans", Nutrition Reviews, 2022, 80(2), 255-270; Ertugrul et al., International Journal of Food Science & Technology, 2021, 56(10), 5334-5339.