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Jaggery, honey and dates: still sugar?

· 3 min read

"No refined sugar" has become one of the most common lines on Indian snack packs. Cookies with jaggery, granola with honey, spreads with dates. They often taste better and feel more traditional. But are they less sugary?

What jaggery actually is

Jaggery is sugarcane juice boiled down without separating out the molasses. It's mostly sucrose, the same sugar as white sugar, at roughly 65–85%, plus some glucose and fructose. It also keeps small amounts of iron, potassium and magnesium. That's a real difference from white sugar, but the amounts in a teaspoon or two are small. Jaggery isn't a practical way to get minerals.

The jaggery powder in our own catalog lists 83 g of sugar per 100 g.

Honey and dates

Honey is about 80% sugar. The WHO's definition of "free sugars", the kind it advises limiting, explicitly includes honey and syrups along with table sugar.

Dates are different when you eat them whole, as a fruit. Once they're turned into paste or syrup to sweeten something, they're doing the job of sugar. India's rules agree: a food sweetened with dried-fruit paste can't claim "no added sugar".

What the guidelines say

  • The WHO recommends keeping free sugars below 10% of daily energy, and ideally below 5%.
  • ICMR-NIN's 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians suggest avoiding added sugar or keeping it to about 20–25 g a day for adults, and no added sugar at all for children under two.

To put that in perspective, a single 100 g serving of a cookie made with 27% jaggery uses up the whole daily amount.

What "no added sugar" means in India

FSSAI's rules are strict here. A pack can say "no added sugar" only if:

  • no sugar of any kind has been added, including honey and jaggery;
  • it doesn't contain sweet ingredients such as jam or sweetened chocolate;
  • it doesn't contain sugar substitutes such as dried-fruit paste or juice concentrate;
  • the sugar hasn't been increased by processing.

If the food has natural sugars, the pack should say "contains naturally occurring sugars."

Is jaggery better than white sugar?

Slightly more interesting, nutritionally, and many people like the taste. Your body handles the sugar in much the same way. Jaggery is a fine choice if you like it. Just count it as sugar.

How Everykind labels sugar

  • No added sugar (green) follows the FSSAI definition, including dates and date paste.
  • Sweetened (amber) names the sweetener, such as "Sweetened with jaggery," so "no refined sugar" isn't mistaken for "no sugar."
  • High sugar (amber) appears when total sugar is above 22.5 g per 100 g, the UK's "high" threshold. We use it so the line means the same thing on every product.

We still list lightly sweetened cookies and spreads. We'd just rather you know what's in them.

A note for parents

Baby and toddler snacks sometimes contain cane sugar or jaggery. ICMR's guidance is no added sugar for children under two, so check the list on anything labelled for little ones.

Sources

This is a summary of published research, not medical advice. Related tags on our standard: No added sugar, Sweetened, High sugar.