Is quitting sugar your New Year's resolution? Are you planning, after one final last burst of gastronomic overconsumption, to push the mince pies and candy canes to one side – for good?

Unfortunately, doing the right thing for your health might not be so easy.

If you start scrutinising your food for added sugar, you won't find any, says Professor Amanda Lee. And you can't quit what you can't find.

Professor Lee literally helped write the book on healthy diets. She chaired the National Health and Medical Research Council's Dietary Guidelines Working Committee during its most recent review of the Australian Dietary Guidelines between 2008 and 2012.

The guidelines, based on the best available science, recommend cutting intake of food and drinks with added sugar. But Professor Lee says they are almost impossible to follow, because nutrition labels on food are not legally required to reveal added sugar, just total sugar. The blame lies with the food industry, which has for years lobbied hard against such a change, she says.

"We provide dietary guidance that says 'limit food and drinks containing added sugars'. But people cannot identify from the food label what those things are. This is an absolute furphy," she says.

"Total sugars is not a useful indicator to help people follow the dietary guidelines. The science is showing the problem is with the added sugars."

From mid-2018, America will require food manufacturers to list both total and added sugars on their nutrition labels. Professor Lee wants our government to force companies to do the same here.

The latest food-labelling innovation, Health Star Ratings, is also deeply flawed, says Professor Lee.

The algorithm that calculates the ratings only accounts for sugar, not added sugar. This means many healthy foods are labelled as unhealthy, and many unhealthy foods are not marked down as harshly as Professor Lee believes they should be.

Unsweetened Greek yoghurt, for example, gets one-and-a-half health stars, and smoked salmon gets only two.

Meanwhile, a 290-gram box of Kellogg's Nutri-Grain, for example, contains 77 grams of sugar (about 18 teaspoons' worth). Yet it receives a four-star rating. As does a packet of beer-battered chips.

"You have natural sugars that are intrinsic in milk or fruit or yoghurt. They get treated as just as bad for our health as added sugars. You cannot just break down nutrients and say this one is good, this one is bad. We know that fruit is protective of cardiovascular health, diabetes and obesity," says Professor Lee.

The food industry does not agree. Alby Taylor, the general manager of the Australian Beverages Council, points to research that he says indicates consumers want simple nutritional labels.

"The key issue is the amount of sugar, and that's already on the label. Consumers in our research have indicated they like it clear and simple. Sugar is sugar, whether it is added or otherwise."

Professor John Dixon, a researcher at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute who can also lay claim to being one of Australia's top experts on nutrition, does not believe sugar plays a key role in obesity.

Professor Dixon believes some people are hard-wired to over-consume. When there is enough available food they will always become obese, he believes.

"Dietary choices play a relatively minor role. The problem of obesity is related to regulation of energy in the brain – it's a brain disease. A person who has a tendency to become obese is a person who has a level of hunger in the brain. To satisfy them, their meals need to be bigger.

"It does not really matter what food you put in someone who has that regulatory problem. Changing bad food for good food won't help.

"The idea we have self-control over our weight, for the vast majority of people, is bunkum. We have absolutely no evidence in medicine that that is the case at all. In fact, we have clear evidence that that is just wrong."

Ingredients you'll find on labels that are actually sugar, compiled by Choice:

Agave nectar/syrup
Barley malt
Beet sugar
Blackstrap molasses
Brown sugar
Cane sugar
Carob syrup
Caster sugar
Coconut sugar
Coffee sugar crystals
Confectioner's sugar
Corn syrup
Date sugar/syrup
Demerara
Dextrose
Evaporated cane juice
Fructose
Fruit juice
Fruit juice concentrate
Glucose
Golden syrup
Grape sugar/syrup
High-fructose corn syrup 
Honey
Icing sugar
Invert sugar
Lactose
Malt
Maltose
Maple syrup
Molasses
Muscovado
Palm sugar
Panela
Powdered sugar
Rapadura
Raw sugar
Rice syrup
Sucrose
Sugar
Treacle
Turbinado
White sugar