Call for global sugar reduction targets

The survey, which reviewed 274 sugar sweetened soft drinks produced across the world, found that every single product (with available nutrition data) would receive a dangerously high red colour-coded label if it were consumed in a standard 330ml can. Furthermore, 88 per cent of products (with available nutrition data) contain more than your entire recommendation for the day. A 330ml can of Coca Cola, Pepsi or 7Up contain more than an entire adult’s maximum daily amount of free sugars for the day (25g – 6 tsp/d).

In four out of seven cases, the countries with the highest free sugars content per 330ml were in North America (either Canada or the USA), compared to countries in Europe which had the lowest sugar content.

The greatest variation between countries was in Schweppes Tonic Water with a variation of 29g (7 tsp) of sugars between the country (USA) - which produced the most sugary variety of Schweppes Tonic Water – and the country (Argentina) which produced the lowest. Sprite also had a high variation of 28g (7 tsp).

Interestingly the sugar sweetened soft drink products produced by PepsiCo generally had less nutritional information available (on average) for consumer reference (i.e. 37 per cent of the products surveyed) which adds to further concern about transparency when it comes to labelling.