No added sugar means nothing was added during manufacture, with no cap on the sugar already in the ingredients. Sugar-free, under FSSAI rules, means not more than 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g. Natural sugars are still sugar. Only one of the three tells you what is actually in the food.
What does "no added sugar" actually mean?
No added sugar means no sugars were put in during manufacture. It says nothing about how much sugar is already in the food. A date-sweetened bar and a plain milk drink can both carry the claim, and one of them may still be a third sugar by weight.
Dates are the most common way to keep the claim while keeping the sweetness. They run to roughly 67 g of sugar per 100 g in USDA's figures for Medjool, so about two-thirds of what you're eating is sugar.
In fairness to dates, they aren't the same as spooning in sucrose. Alkaabi and colleagues, in Nutrition Journal in 2011, measured five varieties and found low glycemic indices, which the fibre and the structure of the fruit probably explain.
That advantage shrinks once dates are pressed into paste or boiled into syrup. And it never shows up in the arithmetic on the front of the pack. The sugar is there. It just doesn't have to be called added.
So treat the claim as a fact about the factory rather than a fact about the food.
What does "sugar-free" mean under Indian rules?
Sugar-free in India means not more than 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g or 100 ml, under FSSAI's Advertising and Claims Regulations, 2018. That is a limit on the food, measured by weight. The US rule is 0.5 g per serving, which is a far easier bar to clear.
The difference matters more than it sounds. A per-serving rule can be met by shrinking the serving. A per-100 g rule can't.
The same schedule sets low sugar at not more than 5 g of sugars per 100 g for solids, or 2.5 g per 100 ml for liquids. That's a real claim with a real number behind it, and it's the one most "healthier" products are actually eligible for.
"Natural" isn't on that list at all. It carries no sugar threshold, no test and no meaning for blood glucose.
Are natural sugars any better than white sugar?
Natural sugars from jaggery, honey, coconut sugar or fruit behave like sugar once they're inside you. Jaggery does worse than white sugar on the measure most people care about. Veerbhan and Malik, in a 2025 review, put its glycemic index at 84 against roughly 65 for sucrose.
The same review describes jaggery as around 50% sucrose plus about 20% invert sugar. Strip away the colour and the story and most of what's left is the thing you were trying to avoid.
The minerals are real, and they're present in small amounts. You'd have to eat a lot of jaggery for the iron to matter, and the sugar arrives a long time before the iron does.
None of this makes jaggery villainous. It makes it sugar with a better reputation than it has earned, which is exactly what a health halo is. If you're managing blood glucose day to day, our guide to sugar substitutes for diabetics in India goes further into what that means at meal times.
Which label should you actually trust?
Sugar-free is the only one of the three claims that puts a hard number on total sugars, so it's the only one worth trusting on its own. No added sugar tells you about the factory rather than the food. Natural tells you nothing at all, because it isn't a regulated sugar claim.
| Claim on the pack | What FSSAI requires | What it tells you about blood sugar |
|---|---|---|
| Sugar-free | Not more than 0.5 g sugars per 100 g or 100 ml | Nearly everything. Close to no sugar by weight. |
| Low sugar | Not more than 5 g per 100 g, or 2.5 g per 100 ml | Something. Still sugar, just less of it. |
| No added sugar | No sugars added during manufacture. No cap on what was already there. | Very little. Read total sugars instead. |
| "Natural" or "naturally sweetened" | Nothing. Not a regulated sugar claim. | Nothing. |
Read the table once and the pattern is obvious. The claims get louder as the numbers behind them get weaker.
So is a monk fruit and allulose blend actually zero sugar?
A monk fruit and allulose blend carries no sucrose, no glucose and no fructose. Allulose has the chemistry of a sugar and almost none of the behaviour: your body passes most of it out unchanged, so it delivers close to no energy and barely moves blood glucose. Mogrosides aren't sugars at all.
Start with what happens after you swallow it. Roughly 70% of allulose is absorbed in the small intestine and excreted unchanged in urine within a day, and the rest passes through. Daniel and colleagues, reviewing the human evidence in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2021, describe the energy yield as close to zero.
That is the whole reason it behaves nothing like table sugar. We have no metabolic pathway that breaks allulose down for fuel, so the calories never arrive and the glucose curve stays flat.
The FDA reached the same conclusion after five years of looking at it. Tate and Lyle petitioned in 2015 and again in 2017, The Food Lawyers petitioned in 2016, and in October 2020 the agency issued final guidance finding that allulose "does not promote dental caries and is virtually unmetabolized in the human body", and that eating it "produces only a negligible increase in glycemic and insulinemic responses".
Allulose therefore comes out of both the total sugars and the added sugars declarations. Three citizen petitions, five years of review, and the science won on the merits. We went through the whole story in why the FDA doesn't count allulose as a sugar.
Monk fruit needs less explaining. Its sweetness comes from mogrosides, which a 2016 paper in PNAS calls nonsugar, high-intensity sweeteners. They are triterpene glycosides, structurally unrelated to sucrose, and they carry no calories.
Put the two together and there is nothing in the pack your body processes as sugar. Not less sugar. None.
What makes a monk fruit and allulose blend different?
A monk fruit and allulose blend is the one common sweetener format that covers both jobs sugar does. Monk fruit brings the sweetness. Allulose brings the bulk, the browning and the texture. Take either one away and you get something that tastes sweet without behaving like sugar.
That second job is where most zero-calorie sweeteners quietly fail. Sweetness is easy. Getting a cake to rise, a caramel to darken and a cup of chai to taste like chai is the hard part, and it needs something with body.
Our blend is two ingredients. Monk fruit and allulose, both zero glycemic index, both zero calorie (allulose having close to zero calories, i.e ~0.4 kcal/g), FSSAI approved. No erythritol, no maltodextrin, nothing bulking it out. No cooling effect and no chemical finish.
We think it's the best sugar replacement you can buy in India right now. We'd also rather show you what that rests on than ask you to take it on trust, which is why the ingredients list is two lines long and the nutrition panel is printed rather than hinted at.
It's the same two ingredients doing the work in our zero added sugar choco hazelnut spread, which carries 3.3 g of total sugar per 100 g, inside FSSAI's low-sugar threshold, every gram of it lactose from milk solids rather than anything we added.
One honest caveat. A small number of people find allulose sits heavily if they jump straight to a large amount. Start with half of what you'd normally use and build up over a week or two, and it usually settles. Our guide to allulose covers the dose ceiling properly.
How do you check a pack in ten seconds?
Ignore the front of the pack and turn it over. Find total sugars per 100 g in the nutrition panel, then read the ingredients list from the top, because ingredients are declared in descending order of weight. Two numbers and one list will tell you more than every claim on the front.
- Total sugars per 100 g. Not per serving. Serving sizes are chosen by the brand; 100 g is chosen by physics.
- The first three ingredients. Anything that high up is doing real work in the recipe.
- Sugar under another name. Invert syrup, glucose syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, fruit juice concentrate, date paste. All sugar, none of it obliged to say so on the front.
- What's bulking it out. A sweetener that lists erythritol or maltodextrin before its named sweetener is mostly filler.
Do that four times in a supermarket aisle and you'll never need the front of a pack again. Our guide to monk fruit has the same treatment for that ingredient specifically.
Frequently asked questions
Is "no added sugar" the same as sugar-free?
No. No added sugar means nothing was added during manufacture, with no limit on the sugar already present in the ingredients. Sugar-free in India means not more than 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g. A no-added-sugar product can legally contain many times more sugar than a sugar-free one.
Is jaggery better than white sugar?
Not for blood glucose. Veerbhan and Malik, in a 2025 review, report jaggery's glycemic index at 84 against roughly 65 for white sugar, and describe it as around 50% sucrose plus 20% invert sugar. It carries trace minerals that white sugar doesn't, in amounts too small to change the arithmetic.
Does "sugar-free" mean zero calories?
No. Sugar-free is a limit on sugars, not on calories. A sugar-free biscuit still has flour and fat, and those carry most of the calories anyway. Check the energy value in the nutrition panel separately from the sugar figure, because the two claims are unrelated.
Are date-sweetened products safe for diabetics?
Treat them as sugar and portion them accordingly. Dates run to about 67 g of sugar per 100 g, and while Alkaabi and colleagues found low glycemic indices for whole dates in 2011, that advantage shrinks in paste and syrup. Ask your doctor about your own targets before changing anything.
Does going sugar-free help with weight loss?
Swapping sugar for a zero-calorie sweetener removes calories from your day, and that's the whole mechanism. A 2026 review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition pooled 20 human trials of allulose and found no independent effect on body weight. The calories you don't eat are the part that counts.
What can I use in chai and coffee instead of sugar?
A monk fruit and allulose blend dissolves in hot liquid and doesn't leave a cooling finish, which is the usual complaint with erythritol-based sweeteners. Start with less than you'd use of sugar and adjust upward. Sweetness perception shifts within about two weeks of cutting sugar, so early judgements are unreliable.
Where these numbers come from
Every threshold on this page comes from the regulation itself, and every research figure is named with its journal and year. Beyond The Sugar makes sweeteners and holds lab reports and supplier documentation for its own products. It runs no clinical research, and nothing here should be read as ours.
- Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, Schedule I. FSSAI compendium, updated 2022, linked above.
- Veerbhan K, Malik A (2025). The health halo of jaggery: benefits beyond sugar, but a high glycemic index risk. Magna Scientia Advanced Research and Reviews, 14(02). Read the review
- Alkaabi JM, et al. (2011). Glycemic indices of five varieties of dates in healthy and diabetic subjects. Nutrition Journal. Read the study
- Daniel H, et al. (2021). Allulose in human diet: the knowns and the unknowns. British Journal of Nutrition. Read the review
- FDA (2020). The Declaration of Allulose and Calories from Allulose on Nutrition and Supplement Facts Labels: Guidance for Industry. Final guidance, October 2020.
- Itkin M, et al. (2016). The biosynthetic pathway of the nonsugar, high-intensity sweetener mogroside V from Siraitia grosvenorii. PNAS. Read the paper
- USDA FoodData Central, Medjool dates, total sugars per 100 g.
- Glycemic and cardiometabolic effects of rare sugars allulose and tagatose (2026). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Next time a pack tells you it has no added sugar, you know what it's promising and what it isn't. Turn it over and read the number.
Try our monk fruit and allulose blend in your chai this week and see how little you actually need.