April Fool´s edition: Watch out for ingredient lists!

Several weight loss bloggers whose blogs I follow did post something about no longer eating white yoghourt because of the sugar in it.
Indeed,  for the unaware, the yoghourt shelf may be a hazardous area if they want to avoid ingesting sugar.
Case in point is a particular brand of tsatsiki that DH and me used to buy regularly. Until recently when they started putting nutritional values on the packages. Not an ingredient list, mind you. Just the sum total of carbs, protein, and fat.
If you want to avoid added sugars, on such a label what you look for is carbohydrates. Now, in any milk product, there´s some sugar called lactose (yep, the stuff some people can´t digest) naturally present, to a tune of about 4 grams per 100 grams, i.e. 4 percent of total weight of the product. It´s part of the natural ingredients in unprocessed milk.  So, if you see a number there up to 4 percent of total volume, this is still a product without added sugar.
But if you read something like 15 per cent, or worse, you know that all but four percent of those carbs have been added in, most likely in the form of sugar.
Which is what made us change brands of tsatsiki after reading the numbers on our old favorite.
It also pays to read those ingredient lists on so-called "plain" yoghourts. More than four percent of carbohydrates mean there´s added sugar in there.
But, with checking out the ingredients,  I found it´s still possible to find unsugared milk products.
So, I don´t need to give up eating yoghourt. I just need to choose one that has no extra sugar.
Another place I found extra sugar this weekend was on the ingredient list of a pack of coleslaw. Prepared salads or dressings are notoriously prone to containing high amounts of it. The solution here is stay clear of them. Learn how to prepare a sugar-free vinaigrette, or make your own yoghourt dressing
And then do enjoy your guilt-free version.
For me, bending down before the onslaught of Big Sugar pushing their products at us just isn´t an option.
Choosing products that do not contain added sugar is.

If enough of us do that, there might be more products without added sugar.


Julia