Tools
How many carbs and sugars?
Pick a food and a quantity: see how many carbs and sugars it contains. Handy for staying within your keto limits.
How much hidden sugar? 🧊
Each cube is one teaspoon of sugar (≈ 4 g). Here's how many teaspoons hide in a serving of some common foods.
Indicative values per serving. One cube ≈ 1 teaspoon ≈ 4 g of sugar.
And blood sugar? The real impact 🩸
What matters isn't just the glycaemic index, but the glycaemic load: the serving's "sugar density", i.e. how much a food really raises blood sugar. It's the most reliable measure, and Dr. David Unwin translates it into teaspoons of sugar: so rice, potatoes and bread "weigh" as many teaspoons, even with very little sugar.
Common foods
Fruit
Calculation (glycaemic load): glycaemic index × carbs in the serving ÷ 100, converted into 4 g teaspoons. Glycaemic load is more reliable than the index alone because it accounts for how many carbs the serving actually contains. Source: Dr. David Unwin · Freshwell Low Carb Project.
Frequently asked questions
What are hidden sugars?
They are sugars added to foods we don't perceive as sweet: ready-made sauces, fruit yogurt, sandwich bread, breakfast cereals, drinks. On labels they appear under many names — glucose-fructose syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, concentrated fruit juice — and combined they can exceed the sugar in a dessert.
What is the difference between carbs and sugars?
Sugars are the simple part of carbohydrates (glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose). Total carbs also include starches and fibre. On keto you usually count net carbs, the ones that actually raise blood glucose.
What are net carbs?
Total carbohydrates minus fibre (and, if you use them, minus polyols such as erythritol). Fibre is not digested like other carbs and doesn't significantly raise blood glucose: that's why keto excludes it from the count.
Which foods look keto but aren't?
The sneakiest ones: fruit yogurt (up to 15-20 g of sugar per pot), ready-made sauces like ketchup and sweet-and-sour, milk (it contains lactose), dried fruit, fitness bars and many "no added sugar" products that are still rich in starches.