'Sugar-free' sounds like one of the clearest phrases in the world. Then you pick up a product and find 'sugar-free', 'no added sugar', 'naturally sweetened', 'without refined sugar', 'sweetened with dates'. Suddenly buying a dessert requires a small dictionary of European food law.
First, several entirely different things need to be separated.
Under European rules, the sugar-free label has a concrete meaning: the product must contain no more than 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g or 100 ml. That is not philosophy — it is a measurable threshold.
With no added sugars means something different. No mono- or disaccharides have been added, nor any other food used for its sweetening function. If the product naturally contains sugars, the label must state that it contains naturally occurring sugars.
This is why yoghurt can be with no added sugar and still show sugar in the nutrition table. Lactose is naturally present in milk.
The same applies to fruit.
A banana contains glucose, fructose, and sucrose. That does not make a banana "added sugar." The sugars sit within the food matrix together with water, fibre, vitamins, minerals, and other compounds. The WHO makes precisely this distinction between sugars naturally present in whole fruit and milk and the category of free sugars.
Free sugars include sugar added by a manufacturer, cook, or consumer, but also sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices, and fruit juice concentrates.
This is where wellness marketing becomes particularly creative.
Replacing white sugar with honey, maple syrup, or agave syrup does not produce a product free of free sugars. The source of the sugar has changed, along with the flavour, the ratio of glucose to fructose, and possibly the glycaemic response — but the word "natural" has not erased the molecules.
This matters for us too, because at VERA we use agave syrup and erythritol in certain signature desserts instead of refined white sugar.
Agave interests us for its technical properties, its flavour, and its lower glycemic index relative to sucrose — but agave syrup is a source of free sugars. Erythritol is a different matter: it is a polyol, or sugar alcohol, and behaves metabolically in a very different way from sucrose, with minimal acute effect on blood glucose and insulin.
Precise language is therefore better than marketing language.
If a recipe contains no refined white sugar, we can say exactly that. If it contains no added sugar in the regulatory sense, that is a different claim. If a product meets the threshold for "sugar-free," that is a third. These three sentences are not synonyms.
And what about dates?
If pieces of dates are added to a dish because fruit is wanted, the result is whole fruit. If a date paste or syrup is made and used primarily to sweeten a product, things become more complicated — the regulatory treatment depends on the specific form and product. Nutritionally it is certainly wrong to say a dessert has "no sugar" simply because the sweetness comes from a date.
The same applies to apple concentrate, coconut sugar, rice syrup, and ten other ingredients that sound more agreeable than the word sucrose.
The body does not read the typography on the front of the package.
This does not mean all sources of sweetness are metabolically identical. They are not. They differ in composition, glycaemic response, energy, flavour, effect on teeth, metabolic pathway, and behaviour in a recipe.
But there is a difference between "they are not the same" and "this is no longer sugar."
WHO recommends that free sugars remain below 10% of total energy intake, with possible additional benefit below 5%. That recommendation does not require never eating a dessert. It only asks that we stop believing sugar has disappeared once we have given it a more expensive name.
We therefore find the idea of a thoughtful dessert more appealing than the idea of a guilt-free one.
Food should not produce guilt, so we do not need a product to free us from it. If we can make an excellent dessert with less reliance on refined sugar and a more considered choice of sweetener, that is interesting enough on its own terms.
We do not need to claim that sweetness now exists only metaphorically.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Comfort food at VERA →