Four yoghurts with more sugar than cheesecake

Have you ever found yourself in the dairy aisle looking for a sweet treat, and opted for something yoghurt-like over a tub of Ben and Jerry’s to try and be a bit healthier?

Truth is, some of these more decadent-looking yoghurts have more sugar in them than a slice of store-bought cheesecake!

This week saw Public Health England crack down on sugary yoghurts in the UK. The health body, which has been put in charge of the UK Childhood Obesity Strategy, thinks manufacturers should cap the size of single-serve pots of yoghurt at 125g and reduce the average amount of sugar from 11.05 to 8.8 per cent by 2020.

With around 60 per cent of UK supermarket yoghurts containing too much sugar according to the new targets, we’ve rounded up four of the craziest-looking sugary yoghurts we’ve spotted in Aussie supermarkets.

(For your reference a slice of Sara Lee cheesecake has around 12 of sugar.)

1. YoGo Mix: Choc YoGo with M&M’s Minis, $2.74

You’ll go ape when you read the ingredients in this gorilla-fronted yoghurt. While the first is milk, this is quickly followed by sugar, vegetable fat and 10 different numbers, representing a range of artificial colours and preservatives.

Sugar content: 31.2g (approximately 7.5 teaspoons) per serve.

2. Nestlé Vanilla Flavoured Yoghurt with Mini Smarties, $2.75

After discovering its Milkybar Vanilla Flavoured Yoghurt with six teaspoons of sugar, we did a little digging to see what else Nestlé was spooning up.

Read the nutritional label of its Vanilla Flavoured Yoghurt with Mini Smarties and you’ll realise that adding colourful, crunchy chocolate buttons to an already sweet yoghurt was, ironically, not very smart.

Sugar content: 22.68g (approximately 5.7 teaspoons) per serve.

3. Rachel’s Gourmet Greek Yoghurt in Salted Caramel, $3

This sophisticated-sounding yoghurt appears to be having an identity crisis. While Greek yoghurt is generally one of our favourites, these little packets come swimming with syrupy  sauce containing caramelised sugar, juice concentrate and sweetened condensed milk.

It may sit among the breakfast offerings, but this flaunts a sugar reading higher than many desserts.

Sugar content: 26.1g (approximately six teaspoons) per serve.

4. Paul’s Milky Max Chocolate Dairy Snack, $5.50

It looks like yoghurt, sounds like yoghurt (“a source of calcium packed with dairy goodness for growing bodies”) – heck it’s even stocked among the yoghurts. But look at the fine print and you’ll discover that this little pot is so far removed from a good yoghurt that it doesn’t even begin to qualify.

Sugar content: 17.8g (approximately four teaspoons) per serve.

(Also worth mentioning: Nestlé Milo Energy Dairy Snack, which tried a similar labelling tactic but has 13.3g of sugar per serve. That energy rush won’t last long, that’s for sure!)

The yoghurts you can say yes too!

When buying yoghurt, always opt for natural or plain full-fat varieties which are about 4.7g/100g sugar (of the fructose-free lactose type). Which still leaves plenty of options – check out the ones which passed the I Quit Sugar yoghurt test.

We originally published this post in March 2016. We updated it in November 2016.

SHARE

About Unknown