I’ve noticed of late a tendency for food advertisers to claim ‘No Added Cane Sugar’. No doubt they do this on the advice of lawyers that they wouldn’t get away with ‘No Added Sugar’ and on the advice of marketers that the punters wont know the difference.
One example hitting the airwaves at the moment is Jalna Yoghourts. They say:
“Jalna Yoghourts and Yoghourt On The Go are made from all-natural ingredients from wholefoods, with no added cane sugar or artificial sweeteners. Fructose, a natural sugar in fruit, and lactose, a natural sugar in milk, are the only sugars in Jalna dairy foods.“
A quick check of the label on Jalna Premium Vanilla Creamy Yoghourt tells me that it contains 24g of ‘sugars’ in every serve (200g). According to the US Department of Agriculture, 200g of plain unsweetened yoghurt will contain 9.32g of lactose. So the other 14.6g in the Jalna must be fructose. To get that much fructose from sugar you would need to eat 29.2g (or just under seven teaspoons) of it. Not bad for ‘No added Sugar’ – which is what the label actually says (maybe it’s a typo).
So if there is no added sugar, where is all the fructose coming from? The ingredients list includes ‘fruit juice concentrate‘. The fructose is just being added straight in without all that annoying glucose that comes in sugar.
Be careful out there in the dairy aisle, Jalna yoghurts are amongst the lowest in overall sugar content, so you can imagine what some of the others are like.
Hi David,
Welcome to the low carb world!
While the sweetened/flavoured yoghurts like Jalna’s Premium range undoubtedly have sugars added (either as sucrose of fructose or just from the fruit flavourings themselves … or both) there is another reason commercial yoghurts in Australia are higher carb than necessary and the is “non fat milk solids”. I don’t have any Jalna products handy, but I’d be surprised if your example was an exception to this practice of adding NFMS – supposedly to give improved mouth feel or creaminess, but all it does is add extra lactose and while some of the glucose is digested during fermentation, all of the galactose remains and this explains why the end product is higher in carbs than home made (made just from milk and some starter culture).
Hope that helps.
Another telling example of the “no added sugar” variety is jam, where fruit juice concentrate is substituted, and I’m sure you’ll agree even the sucrose sweetened original would be healthier than that!
Feel free to drop by and chat with the friendly bunch at the Empower forum http://www.empowerfoods.com.au/forums/
Cheers,
Malcolm
Thanks for the heads-up Malcolm. I’ll swing by empower and take a look.