Posted by kathryn in Dairy and Labels & advertising

Today is the inaugural Q & A Thursday – your weekly opportunity to get answers to all those niggling nutrition, food and diet questions.

Question

Matt asks about “lite” yoghurts, following the release of a new Choice report – are they good for you and what exactly qualifies as “lite”.

I have to say that food labelling is one of my favourite topics, so I’m very happy to be starting off with this question.

Light / lite yoghurts

Matt, I saw the Choice report and I agree with them. This is one of those food labelling loopholes that really annoys me and leads to much confusion among consumer. The use of the words “light” or “lite” are no guarantee that the yoghurt has less fat or fewer kilojoules than other yoghurts. In fact, as the Choice report points out, a number of these yoghurts have as many, if not more, kilojoules as their full fat neighbours. Some of them have the equivalent of seven teaspoons of sugar per 200gram pot.

What does light / lite mean

Food manufacturers have really latched onto our fear of fat – if you look around the supermarket shelves there’s an abundance of products claiming to be healthy based on their fat content.

However, many of these claims are misleading, including the use of “light” and “lite”. While these terms are frequently used, they have no formal definition and are practically meaningless. Depending on the product, “light” can refer to:

• taste and colour (for example light olive oil)
• it can mean the product is lower in kilojoules and/or fat than similar products, although it may still be high in fat and kilojoules overall
• it can mean the product is lower in kilojoules and/or fat than other products in the manufacturer’s range.

In terms of fat content, the only legally defined terms are “low fat”, where the product must contain less than 3% fat, and “fat free”, where the product must have no more than 0.15% fat.

Which yoghurt to buy

So what yoghurts should you look for? Well, firstly ignore the “light” / “lite” garbage – those terms are not going to help you. However, given that most full fat yoghurt is only about 3.4% fat, even the “low fat” stuff is not giving you much of an advantage.

When you’re at the supermarket, deciding what to buy, it’s important to look at the nutritional labels, rather than the marketing. For yoghurts ignore the fat and carbohydrate values, just check the overall kilojoule content per 100grams . For yoghurts, anything below about 300kJ per 100grams is a low energy product, with the normal being 400 – 650kJ.

Yoghurt is a great food to eat. I love it and have it basically every day. Personally I tend to go for natural, plain, unsweetened yoghurts. I have this with my muesli in the morning and sometimes on fruit in the evening. If I do want it to be a bit sweeter, I’ll add honey – but buying plain yoghurt means I have control over this.

A Quick Plug

There is so much deviousness out there in the food marketing and labelling world and decoding food labels can be a tricky thing to do. If anyone in Sydney would like to know more, then I’ll be covering all of this in much more detail during my Healthy Shopping Tours.

31 May, 2007