Tracked as a cap
Sugar tracking
- Unit
- g
- Default cap
- 50 g
- Direction
- Stay under
What it is, and why people track it
Sugar is where the difference between a goal and a cap stops being cosmetic. A tracker that only counts up will happily show you 90 g of sugar with no indication that anything happened.
Most sugar is also unlabelled in the sense that matters: people who cap it are rarely surprised by the soda and frequently surprised by the pasta sauce, the granola, the flavored yogurt and the bread.
Setting your number
AIM caps sugar at 50 g a day by default. That matches the WHO's 10%-of-energy figure on a 2,000 kcal day, with 25 g as its further-reduction target. The 2025–2030 US guidelines went further: no amount of added sugar is considered part of a healthy diet, with a working ceiling of 10 g per meal. Note that AIM's standard metric counts total sugars, for added sugar specifically, add it as a custom metric.
How good is the estimate?
Good for whole foods and packaged items, weaker for restaurant sauces and dressings, which are consistently sweeter than they appear.
Questions
- What is a reasonable daily sugar limit?
- The WHO recommends keeping free sugars under 10% of energy intake, with a further reduction to 5%, 50 g and 25 g on a 2,000 kcal day. The 2025–2030 US guidelines replaced the percentage with a per-meal ceiling of 10 g of added sugar, and the position that none of it is necessary.
- Can I track added sugar separately from total sugar?
- Yes. The standard metric is total sugars; add “added sugar” as a custom metric with its own cap if that is the number you care about.
Also in this group
Protein
Protein is the metric most people open a tracker for. AIM estimates it per ingredient rather than per meal, so a swap of chicken for tofu shows up where it happened.
Carbs
Carbohydrate, broken out per ingredient, with fiber and sugar tracked separately so “carbs” does not have to mean three different things at once.
Fat
Total fat per meal, with saturated fat tracked separately as a cap, because they are two different questions and one number cannot answer both.
Fiber
Fiber is the nutrient most people are short on and least likely to have a field for. In AIM it is a standard metric with its own goal and its own color on every chart.
Track sugar without a database search
AIM estimates it on every meal from a photo or a sentence, and lets you correct anything it got wrong just by saying so.