6 ‘Health Foods’ With More Sugar Than a Candy Bar

I’ll never forget the first time I felt duped by thinking I was making a healthy choice that ended up being the exact opposite. It was AriZona Iced Tea. And it was one of those big, giant tall boys. I am also pretty sure I was standing in a gas station (I think I was in my late teens), which was surrounded by a ton of traditionally unhealthy choices. Every soda imaginable. Energy drinks. Basically anything that jacks up the sugar to taste good. But I was going to be strong and make the healthy choice (even though I obviously wanted something that wasn’t good for me.)

In my mind, I was choosing tea over something like a soda or even a fruit juice. Tea is healthy, right? Tea has antioxidants (I told myself.) It is an ancient drink that has been known to help longevity. It’s not manufactured, right? So away I went with a giant iced tea. Smug in my confidence that I was finally making an adult decision about my food choices.

I drank AriZona iced teas for at least a year and a half consistently. Always thinking I was making the right choice. And then one day as I was bragging about making a healthy beverage choice someone asked me if I had ever looked at the label. And the answer was embarrassingly…no. I hadn’t. So I turned it around and was shocked.

This “healthy” drink has 66 grams of sugar! That seems like a lot! So I turned over the back of a regular sized Snickers bar and saw that it had only 27 grams of sugar. Something’s not right here. This is the reason for this article. A Snickers bar is never pretending to be the healthy choice. It’s a candy bar, a treat. No one has ever bought a Snickers bar thinking it was the healthy choice.

But with marketing language as it is these days it’s easy to think you’re buying something that could be classified as healthy and actually be the exact opposite. For this we’re using the Snickers as the benchmark for sugar content because it is the classic candy bar. You can find other candy bars that have more or less sugar if you’d prefer to compare these to something else.

But the main issue here is the products on this list are sometimes trying to trick you into thinking they are healthy. Words like “green,” “vitamin,” “real fruit,” and even “simply” are all over their packaging. Which makes you think one thing. But you’ll think something completely different when you see how much sugar is in them.

A little context for this list: the FDA’s daily value for added sugar is 50 grams for a 2,000 calorie diet. And some clinicians think that is too much. “I would actually like to see that be less than 5%, and closer to zero for some, if they have diabetes or prediabetes,” Collin Popp, a dietitian and professor at NYU Langone Health, told the Associated Press. Keep that in mind if you have diabetes or just want to keep your added sugar intake as low as possible.

1. Jamba Razzmatazz (Medium): 74 Grams of Sugar

Jamba’s own nutrition tables put a medium Razzmatazz at 74 grams of sugar, the biggest number on this list. The first two items are on this list because the names of the restaurants give the “this is healthy vibe.” For the Razzmatazz, you walk into something called Jamba Juice and you assume it’s attempting to be healthy. Juice is mostly healthy, right? Well, don’t always believe what you read. And this is a blend of fruit juice and fruit puree, which means it will show up in the label as natural rather than added sugar. “Even though it’s natural sugar, if there’s no protein or fat to balance it out, it hits your bloodstream all at once,” registered dietitian Jessica Cording told HuffPost, describing exactly this construction of fruit-on-fruit smoothies and bowls.

2. Smoothie King Angel Food (20 oz): 71 Grams of Sugar

Another name of a store that makes you think it’s healthy. Smoothies are healthy, right? Well, they can be! If they are made with minimally processed ingredients like real fruit and liquids. Sadly the Angel Food smoothie is not. But if we’re being honest, the name “Angel Food” is probably a hint that this isn’t the healthiest option on their menu. The smallest size of this smoothie carries 71 grams of total sugar, 50 of them added, per Smoothie King’s own nutrition data. Read that added-sugar number again: 50 grams is 100% of the FDA’s daily value, in one drink, before you eat anything else all day. One Angel Food is the equivalent of about two and a half Snickers bars.

3. AriZona Iced Tea (22 oz Big Can): 66 Grams of Sugar

I went over this one in the intro. The classic 99-cent can feels like a healthier choice than a Coke, but the fact is, it contains a whopping 66 grams of sugar and nearly 250 calories per can. For context, a 20-ounce bottle of Coke has 65 grams of sugar. The other thing to note here is that unlike the first two on this list, almost all of the AriZona iced tea’s sugar comes from high fructose corn syrup. If you break out the calculator, that’s about 132% of the FDA’s daily value for added sugar.

4. Naked Green Machine (15.2 oz): 49 Grams of Sugar

Green usually signals healthy. So do words like kale, broccoli, spinach and even spirulina. But this also packs 49 grams of sugar (about two full Snickers.) Most of the sugar comes from apple and additional fruit juices. So while those greens are good for you, they are surrounded by tons of sweets. Here is the labeling quirk worth knowing: the FDA counts juice-concentrate sugars as “added” only when they exceed what plain 100% juice would contain. A drink that is entirely juice blends can legally read 0 grams added sugar while carrying 49 grams of the stuff. (Naked also sells a separate “No Sugar Added” Green Machine, which is a different product; check which one is in your hand.)

5. Craisins Original (¼ Cup): 29 Grams of Sugar

This is another example of a product that I thought was a healthy choice, but actually was not. Instead of snacking on something like M&M’s I assumed that Craisins (which were just cranberries, I thought) would be a healthy choice. Cranberries are fruit! Unfortunately there is one more ingredient on the label: sugar. The ingredient list on Ocean Spray’s original dried cranberries is two items long: cranberries and sugar. Cranberries are too tart to eat dried without help, and the help amounts to 29 grams of total sugar per quarter-cup, 26 of them added. That is a full-size candy bar hiding in the amount you would casually toss on a salad or into trail mix, from a package with fruit on the front.

6. Vitaminwater Power-C (20 oz): 27 Grams of Sugar

Another labeling misdirection. Vitamin water sounds like it’s water, but only healthier. The problem is, it’s not. (In fact, almost nothing beats good, old fashioned regular water.) This has basically the same amount of sugar as a Snickers.  The one part that makes it worse: all 27 grams are added sugar, beating the candy bar’s 25. The vitamins in the name are real and also beside the point. This is sugar water made by Coca-Cola, which is not a coincidence, because Coca-Cola owns it. Most flavors in the line run 26 to 27 grams.

The Ones That Beat the Fun-Size Bar

A second tier deserves a mention. These do not outrun a full-size Snickers, but they double the fun-size version (9 grams) or crowd a two-cup Reese’s package (22 grams), which is a strange achievement for foods sold as breakfast: A Chobani Flip Peanut Butter Cup yogurt runs 20 grams of sugar, within two grams of the actual Reese’s it is imitating. A 6-ounce Yoplait Original strawberry holds 18. A chocolate chip Clif Bar carries 17, with 16 added. And a single packet of Quaker maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal has 12 grams of added sugar, which most adults double, making breakfast sweeter than the Reese’s pack. Granola belongs in this tier as a category. “Some granola can also pack a lot of added sugar, which would make it a less healthy choice,” Rachel Stahl Salzman, a registered dietitian and diabetes specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told TODAY. Cleveland Clinic dietitian Julia Zumpano’s advice in the same piece was to treat granola “not necessarily as a meal in itself, but more like a condiment.”

How to Not Get Fooled Again

When it comes to making sure you’re making the healthy choice, you almost have to totally discount the front of the label on anything you buy. You have to look at the back. Just because something is green or has the word “juice” on the front does not make it healthy. And it’s not to say that you should never drink these! We’re all human and we need to enjoy ourselves. We just need to do it in moderation and be informed on the choices we’re making. You also need to think about the context of your sugar intake. Are you going to splurge on a dessert later? Then opt for water over any of these. Are you not having anymore sugar throughout the day and want this to be your splurge? Then splurge away!

Once you start reading labels this way, breakfast is the first meal that changes. We put together seven breakfasts that keep your blood sugar steady all morning, and if drinks are your weak spot, our ranking of the 10 worst soft drinks for your health names names there too.

Kaelyn Johnson, MPH, R.D.

Kaelyn Johnson is a Registered Dietitian from Southern California who has worked as a clinical dietitian and is now a freelance writer. She has written for WebMD, produced an e-book, and written case studies for healthcare practitioners.