Daily Sugar Intake Calculator
Calculate daily added sugar limit per WHO and AHA guidelines from age, sex, and calorie intake.
AHA recommends 25g per day for women and 36g for men.
Daily sugar intake recommendations come from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Heart Association (AHA).
WHO guidelines recommend that added sugars should be less than 10% of total daily energy intake. For additional health benefits, they suggest reducing this to below 5%.
AHA recommendations for added sugar:
- Men: No more than 36 grams (9 teaspoons) per day
- Women: No more than 25 grams (6 teaspoons) per day
- Children (2-18): No more than 25 grams (6 teaspoons) per day
- Children under 2: No added sugar at all
Activity level affects total calorie needs, which in turn affects the absolute sugar limit. More active people burn more calories, so their 10% threshold is slightly higher in absolute terms. However, the AHA maximums still apply as upper bounds.
Natural sugars found in whole fruits, vegetables, and plain dairy are not counted as “added sugars.” The limits apply only to sugars added during processing, cooking, or at the table.
Common high-sugar foods and their sugar content:
- One can of soda: ~39g of sugar
- One tablespoon of ketchup: ~4g of sugar
- One flavored yogurt cup: ~19g of sugar
How the calorie estimate works
The WHO figures are a percentage of your total energy intake, so the calculator needs a calorie estimate before it can turn 10% into grams. It uses a base figure by age band and sex, then multiplies by activity: no change if sedentary, 15% more if moderately active, 30% more if very active.
That adjustment applies at every age. An earlier version of this page overwrote it for anyone under 19, so a teenage athlete and a sedentary teenager were handed identical limits while the paragraph above promised otherwise.
Where the WHO percentage and the AHA gram figure disagree, the calculator takes the stricter of the two. For most adult men that means the AHA 36 g cap binds, because 10% of 2,500 calories is 62 g.
Reading a label
Nutrition labels in the US and UK now separate “total sugars” from “added sugars”, and only the second line is what these limits are about. Four grams is one teaspoon, which is the quickest mental conversion worth having: a 39 g can of soda is roughly ten teaspoons of sugar.
Staying within these limits reduces the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.
How we build and check this calculator
This calculator runs entirely in your browser, so the numbers you enter stay on your device. The math behind it is written by hand and tested against worked examples and standard references before the page goes live.
SuperGlobalCalculator is independently built and maintained. See how we build and verify our calculators.