Piling on the sugar

One of my pet peeves is the habit food companies have of piling on the sweeteners. Some take the position that anything they sell can be made better with a double-dose of high fructose corn syrup. What results is a society with an obesity epidemic.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Take yogurt, for example. We’ve long been looking to buy a brand with less sweetener added. What we’ve found is it’s harder than you think.

You’d think that by buying brand-name food, or food that touts its health benefits most prominently, you’d be picking the healthiest, right? Wrong. Let’s take a look at three different yogurt brands in our refrigerator right now:

Dannon Activa yogurt. Strawberry flavor, 113 grams. Contains 22 total grams of carbohydrates, of which 19 are sugar.

My Essentials (a bargain brand sold by Food Lion) yogurt. Raspberry flavor, 170 grams. Contains 17 total grams of carbohydrates, of which 12 are sugar.

Kroger CARBmaster yogurt. Peach flavor, 170 grams. Contains 4 grams of carbohydrates, of which 3 are sugar.

I was amazed to learn that Kroger’s yogurt had so many fewer carbohydrates than the other choices (especially for a product called “CARBmaster,” of all things).

As for the Dannon, fully 17% of its total grams are sugars. The My Essentials brand is much lighter in calories than the Dannon brand, at 7% of total grams. Nothing comes close to the Kroger brand, though, at just 2% sugars. And though all three brands are in my refrigerator, my kids actually prefer the low-sugar Kroger brand.

So I’m glad to know that it’s possible to buy at least some foods that aren’t smothered in sugars. It does take some work to ferret them out, though. You can’t go by the marketing slogans alone, that’s for sure.