Yoghurt has been celebrated as one of the best ways to insert healthy eating into your diet. Brands have been praised for their high protein, antioxidants and even dairy-free alternatives, which all help contribute to clean-eating.
However, there is one nasty little secret this apparent superfood has been hiding: It’s sugar content. Many of these foods are hiding some pretty extreme sugar levels, particularly the varieties aimed at kids.
To understand how much sugar your favourite yoghurt contains, here are some simple tricks:
- Ingredients are listed by quantity present. Therefore, the higher ‘sugar’ is on the container’s ingredient list, the greater the quantity it will be. This is a great way to tell if your yoghurt is too sugary, without delving into the mechanics of nutrition.
- Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and aspartame are often added for brands to reduce their sugar content. Ingredients like these are often hard to recognise, but if you see these listed on the back of your container, you can feel confident that there will be less sugar in your meal.
- This trick is particularly relevant for your larger containers. Some brands may list their sugar content as particularly low, but make sure to double check the number of servings in each box. The nutritional information is provided per serving rather than the whole lot, so be sure you are reading the right information.
- Sugars are present both in the displayed value and in the ‘hidden sugars’ which are found naturally in the milk and fruit used to create the yoghurt. So when you are calculating your total sugar content, make sure to take into account the hidden sugars that could be lurking in your pottle.
