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If a food contains more sugar than any other ingredient, government regulations require that sugar be listed first on the label.
But if a food contains several different kinds of sweeteners, they can be listed separately, which pushes each one farther down the list. This requirement has led the food industry to put in three different sources of sugar so that they don’t have to say the food has that much sugar. So sugar doesn’t appear first. Whatever the true motive, ingredient labeling still does not fully convey the amount of sugar being added to food, certainly not in a language that’s easy for consumers to understand. A world-famous cereal brand’s label, for example, indicates that the cereal has 11 grams of sugar per serving. But nowhere does it tell consumers that more than one-third of the box contains added sugar.