“I hardly eat any sugar.”

It is something we hear often, usually followed by a respectable list of things someone has given up: sugar in their tea, fizzy drinks, sweets, perhaps even that biscuit that used to arrive suspiciously regularly with their afternoon coffee. These are worthwhile changes, but the sugar bowl is only telling part of the story.

The rest may be sitting quite innocently in the breakfast bowl, tucked into a lunchbox or piled beside the evening meal, without a single sugar crystal in sight.

With National No Sugar Day on Saturday, 3 October, it is a good time to have a closer look at what we mean when we say we are saying no to sugar. Because leaving the teaspoon in the drawer does not necessarily mean we have reduced everything in our diet that raises blood glucose.

Some sugar is hiding in foods we do not think of as sweet. Sauces, salad dressings, flavoured yoghurts and breakfast cereals can all contain added sugar, while honey and syrups often get a more generous reception because they are “natural”. Somehow, sugar squeezed from a bear-shaped bottle feels more wholesome than sugar scooped from a bowl, but (spoiler…) honey still counts as sugar.

Then there is the thing we tend to overlook altogether: carbohydrates.

Bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and pap contain starch, which is made of glucose molecules joined together. During digestion, enzymes break down digestible starch, releasing glucose that can enter the bloodstream. The food does not have to taste sweet for this to happen; a savoury cracker has no obligation to announce what its starch will become once we have eaten it.

This is where making the invisible visible can be really useful.

Put a familiar food beside a little pile of teaspoons of sugar, and suddenly that number on the nutrition label becomes harder to overlook. We can picture the amount, compare portions, and see why giving up sugar in our tea may be only the beginning.

For illustration, a slice of bread containing 15 grams of digestible carbohydrate represents almost four teaspoon-sized amounts, using roughly four grams per teaspoon. A portion of cereal containing 30 grams represents seven and a half. These are examples; the actual amounts depend on both the product and the portion.

That comparison needs an honest explanation. It does not mean someone tipped four teaspoons of table sugar into the bread, or that bread and sugar have identical effects in the body. The teaspoons make the amount of carbohydrate visible; they are not a precise measurement of the food’s blood-glucose effect.

Glycaemic load takes the idea a step further by considering both the amount of digestible carbohydrate in a portion and its glycaemic index, a measure of its blood-glucose-raising potential. Portion size matters, as do the food’s structure and preparation. Fibre behaves differently from digestible starch, and individual responses vary. We cannot turn every food into an exact pile of sugar and pretend the biology is that tidy. We can, however, stop pretending that only sweet foods count.

The next useful habit is to turn the packet around.

“Natural”, “wholesome” and “no added sugar” may catch our attention, but they do not tell us everything we need to know about what we are about to eat. For that, we need the ingredient list and the nutrition information, even if reading them requires glasses and a little patience in the supermarket aisle.

Start with the ingredient list, looking for sugar and other sources such as glucose syrup, honey, sucrose and fruit juice concentrate. Then check the nutrition information for both sugars and carbohydrates, rather than stopping at the sugar figure. A low sugar number can sit quite happily beside a substantial amount of starch.

Check what the numbers refer to, too: 100 grams, 100 millilitres or a suggested serving. If a drink contains 10 grams of sugar per 100 millilitres and the bottle holds 500 millilitres, drinking the whole bottle delivers 50 grams of sugar, or roughly twelve and a half teaspoons. The maths may be less cheerful than the label.

And be honest about the portion. The serving printed on the cereal box and the serving poured into a hungry person’s bowl are not always on speaking terms.

So, what is the best way to reduce sugar?

Absolutely, say no to added sugar. Leave it out of tea and coffee, skip sugary drinks, and stop treating honey as a loophole. But carry that decision beyond the sugar bowl by cutting down on highly processed foods and reducing carbohydrate-heavy portions, particularly refined starches.

That might mean replacing a cereal breakfast with eggs, choosing water instead of juice, or serving a smaller helping of rice or pap alongside protein and non-starchy vegetables. The aim is to build satisfying meals from foods we recognise, while becoming more aware of how much sugar and digestible starch we actually consume.

At The Noakes Foundation, we want nutrition information to be useful in real life, not just impressive on a slide at a presentation. Understanding what is in a food, how much we eat, and what happens during digestion gives us something practical to work with.

Saying no to sugar is a very good start. Just remember to check whether it has brought a few starchy friends to dinner.