Is Your Yogurt Really Healthy
Are you one of those who love to have a smoothie for breakfast? You start by adding fresh fruits to your blender with some seeds and then finally you add that flavoured yogurt that you have been saving for your smoothie. There you go, a healthy breakfast! But is it so? The moment you added that yogurt to your smoothie, you filled it up with sugar and killed whatever nutrition was there.
The Science Behind It
A study done by the School of Food Science and Nutrition, University of Leeds, UK in 2018, showed that the flavored yogurts that we find in markets are full of sugar and far from being healthy. For the study, the researchers accumulated all the varieties of yogurt available in the market and divided them into various categories.These were children’s, dairy alternatives, dessert, drink, organic, fruit and Greek. These were then individually tested for the amount of sugar, fat, protein, calcium and energy present in them.
What It Showed
Although the nutritional information of every yogurt varied but still almost all of them revealed a high amount of sugar in them. The Greek yogurt was the only kind that had comparatively less amount of sugar. The other categories such as the fruit-flavoured ones, the dairy alternative ones, even the organic yogurt showed such high concentrations of sugar in them that they could be easily be served as a dessert. There was a huge difference between the concentration of sugar present in the Greek yogurt and the other ones.
However, the ones with low sugar concentration also showed that they provided less energy.
What We Learnt
Yogurts are healthy for us and provide a lot of benefits but they also give the body a lot of sugar. To remain healthy, we should stick to the natural yogurt or Greek yogurt. If you like flavoured yogurt, you could add natural fruit to natural yogurt to give it some flavor. Also, remember to read the packaging carefully before buying. Your healthy yogurt might not be so healthy after all.
