A British study has analyzed almost 900 yogurts, finding that the vast majority had a high amount of sugar. Why avoid them and what are they?
This is something that we have commented on many, many occasions, especially every time we have the opportunity to talk to you about yogurt: “the healthiest yogurt when adding to our diet and daily eating is natural yogurt.” That is, yogurt that only contains milk and natural ferments (beneficial bacteria), has no added sugar or sweeteners, and basically contains naturally occurring sugars.
The reason is more than evident: any other yogurt, whatever it is and no matter how healthy it is, contains an exaggerated amount of sugars, making a food nutritious and adequate at first, into a food product that we should not consume.
And although it is something that we have always told you, a new study has come to confirm what we already knew, and what most serious nutritionists ultimately defend: the majority of yogurts that are currently sold in the Supermarkets often have an exaggerated amount of sugars.
Specifically, in the study, the investigations analyzed the sugar content of around 900 yogurts and assimilates. While only 9% of them are low in sugar, the vast majority “are extremely sugary.”
And what is even more worrying: children’s yogurts provide an incredibly high amount of sugar. In fact, only two of the 100 dairy products analyzed aimed exclusively at the child consumer were low in sugar. That is, only 2 of these 100 children’s yogurts had less than 5 grams of sugar per 100 grams of product (the minimum recommendation of the World Health Organization and the British Health System itself).
How to know how much sugar a yogurt has when you go to buy it?
What do we have to look at the label of a yogurt to know how much sugar it has?
In the case of, for example, a baby yogurt or a petit-suisse type dairy product, a four-year-old has already taken more sugar than recommended for a whole day (and still has the whole day to eat, so at the end of the day you will have finished consuming more of the recommended sugar). Especially if we take into account the recommended amount of sugar per day: 19 grams daily for children between 4 to 6 years old, and 24 grams from 7 to 10 years old.
Beware of yogurts with a healthier image (such as organic, organic or soy):
Researchers were surprised to see how yogurts that apparently had a “healthier” image, such as soy-derived yogurts, or organic or organic yogurts, even contained more sugar than the equivalent amount of a conventional cola soda.
Thus, an organic or organic yogurt contained 13.1 grams of sugar per 100 grams, more than double the minimum amount recommended by the WHO and the NHS (British Health System, for its acronym in English).
“Sugar is often used as a sweetener to counteract the natural acidity of lactic acid produced by cultures in yogurt. These microorganisms are what make yogurt good for our digestive system and tend to be present in large quantities in organic yogurts. These are likely to have more added sugar to neutralize the acidity. ‘
The same would happen with fruit or cereal yogurts, which in theory should be healthier. But only in theory, since they also contain a relatively high amount of sugars. Specifically, 11.9 grams of sugars per 100 grams of product.
The best yogurts? Natural and Greek yogurt
In this sense, the researchers have highlighted which yogurts that comply with a more adequate amount of sugars in their composition would be: natural yogurt and Greek yogurt (which will probably surprise you if we take into account that it is a variety of yogurt with a higher fat content, and so curiously maligned for this reason).
For example, both plain yogurt and Greek yogurt contain around 5 grams of sugar per 100 grams of product. Of course, as long as the Greek yogurt is also natural (that is, it is not flavored, flavored or sugary).
Therefore, the most appropriate thing is to choose precisely these two yogurts, if what you want is to consume a food of this type for dessert or as a snack. What if you want a fruit or cereal yogurt? Well, it is best to use homemade fruit from home, or healthy cereals that you can have in the pantry, such as oatmeal.
