I’m actually not seeing anything especially surprising here. Does anyone eat a bite of it and not immediately know it’s got a ton of fat and sugar in it?
They sure tried advertising it as a health food in the USA 20-ish years ago when it was relatively new to the market—“simple, quality ingredients like hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa.” They were sued for deceptive advertising and had to pay millions of dollars.
But yeah, one bite or a look at the ingredients and nutrition label should be enough to warn anyone. The first ingredient is sugar and more than 50% of the food’s mass comes from added sugar.
It’s amazing that anyone was fooled by this marketing. It shows you the power of it I guess.
The first time I tried Nutella I immediately knew what it was: chocolate hazelnut cake frosting. The fact that people slather it on their toast every day seemed as absurd to me as eating cake frosting every day.
North America has long had sweet treats as breakfast or early morning food so I’m surprised you’re surprised.
Things like Danish, donuts, pop tarts, toaster strudel, breakfast cereal… Etc etc
Hold up the Dutch straight up put chocolate sprinkles onto buttered toast and you’re coming at exclusively at the US? And Danish were named after somewhere. Strudel… that sounds awfully germanic… I think Europe is gaslighting us. Also I’ve had European milk chocolate, holy shit.
The danish aren’t all overweight though. 50% of white people in the US are now. 60% or more of the general population last I checked, and it takes an immigrant on average 7 years to become as overweight as the average American.
So something is different.
Sure but not a chocolate cake. Putting Nutella on a piece of bread is basically having a piece of chocolate cake for breakfast.
I mean we have a cereal that’s openly marketed as just a box full of mini chocolate chip cookies
I think the surprising part is that this guy got a jar that was seperated and layered. Mine just comes as one consistant spread.
They might use a toxic emulsifier in it for that reason.
I think it’s a photoshop to show proportions.
It’s clearly AI. How is the jar see through?
Glass?
Knowing it has sugar is one thing. Seeing the volume of sugar relative to the other ingredients is still a shock
Like, for solid food, 50% sugar is what’s typically in sweets, that means 50g sugar in 100g food. 10% sugar (that means 10g sugar in 100g liquid) is what’s in sweet drinks like soda.
The WHO recommends restricting your sugar intake to a maximum of 10% of your calories intake. So for solid food that would be 10g sugar per 100g food, assuming the rest of the food is calorie-rich. For liquids it would be virtually 0g sugar per 100g liquid as liquids contain essentially no other calorie source.
I guess I’ve seen so many of these things that I’ve stopped being surprised. This one was really popular for a long time.
That one can’t be real. There’s more sugar than could physically fit in the coke can. Like no liquid, just sugar, there’s more than 12oz of sugar.
Yeah, even considering the angle, that seems off. I just did a search and plucked one of the first to come up; I wonder if that version has been messed with.
There’s 39 grams of sugar in a a coke can. Sugar is water soluble and 90% of the can is water that can absorb the 10% of sugar.
Hmmm, look at the labels. They each say something something “100”.
Not the right language, but maybe something like per 100? Like per 100 grams of water? Or… something about volume?
IDK, it would be a weird way to do it. But something like that might explain why so much sugar, seemingly more than can fit in the can.
Sugar is heavy, there’s no way 39 grams is the same size as the can
Edit: gandalf seems to have the right idea here! https://sh.itjust.works/comment/24686999
Edit2: wait, a can has 300+ grams of fluid in it… So the sugar would be 1/3 of what the whole can would be. This actually makes the picture more confusing 🤔
Edit 3:
Behold, 39 grams of sugar. About one shot glass worth.
Here’s that glass next to a can. I don’t have any soda pop in the house.
16 to 20 teaspoons of sugar or the equivalent, in a 16 oz pop I’ve read. Can you imagine putting 10 teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee?
Yes
The sugar is liquidated dude, what are you talking about? 😳
there isn’t more than a can full of sugar in a can of soda, that would be syrup.
There is a video about it on YouTube, one can of coke has 8 big full spoons of sugar in it
i’m not sure what you want me to say, it’s basic physics that if you put a larger volume of sugar into a smaller volume of water, that becomes syrup. And soda in the can is very clearly not syrup.
Only it wasn’t palm fat until recently. Shittiest oil on the planet, they’re destroying SO much rain forest and replacing it with palms.
If I’m not mistaken palm oil is the best of the worst. It is fast growing in contrast to the alternatives meaning we’d clear much more rain forest if we were to boycott it straight away. We have to remember to have an alternative on hand every time we propose a boycott of something that’s not easily omitted from use.
Rapeseed (canola) oil doesn’t destroy rain forests. Sunflower oil doesn’t destroy rain forests. Palm oil is the worst.
i’m pretty sure the reason companies want palm oil is because it’s solid (ish) at room temperature, so it makes the product thicker.
I’m not surprised by it any more, but only because I’ve known this for a while now. When I first saw this breakdown (and looked at other sources to confirm), I was caught a bit off guard by the realization that this stuff is well over 50% sugar. The palm oil is not exactly a plus, either.
But it tastes SO sweet…
Well, it was supposed to be mainly a hazelnut cream with some sugar, cocoa and maybe a few other minor ingredients. And in fact, when it was new and conquering markets, that was what it was.
I think the decades starting with the early 1990s had desensitized a lot of us to enormous amounts of sugar, and in the end we didn’t even consciously notice anymore how sweet that stuff had gotten.
I’m actually a bit surprised it has so much sugar in it and they haven’t tried to replace it with some sort of artificial sweetener or HFCS. The sugar has to be the lion share of the cost, maybe tied with the Coco.
The sugar also supplies a significant amount of the volume of the product. Artificial sweetener is significantly sweeter than sucrose, like hundreds of times sweeter, so just swapping the sugar for artificial sweetener would require them to use a bulking agent. The safest bulking agent that doesn’t change the flavor or texture would be sugar.
i mostly agree but sugar absolutely changes texture and flavour of things, that’s why it’s so standard in baking sweets.
Many years ago I developed a weird food intolerance called Fructose Malabsorption. Basically, free fructose molecules mess me up, but sucrose (table sugar) doesn’t, so among other things I started avoiding things with much HFCS in them. I started getting unsweetened iced tea at restaurants and adding sugar. I was absolutely disgusted by how much sugar you have to add to make it as sweet as a soda or sweet tea. In a regular sized drink cup (american medium), I add three packets, and that is very slightly sweet. To make it as sweet as “normal” I’d easily have to add three times that.
Honestly, I’d have thought there’s more added oil/fat in it.
i’m guessing a lot of the fat comes from the hazelnuts themselves, since part of what makes us consider something a nut is that there’s lots of fat in it.
There’s a shocking number of people who see words like “hazelnuts” and think its healthy like plain hazelnuts.
It doesn’t help that Nutella has been advertised as being “part of a healthy breakfast”.
I mean, hitting yourself in the face can be a part of an otherwise healthy routine.
Yeah, I have a healthy routine. Make myself a nice breakfast and eat it while I read the paper, take the dog out, have a shower, take the bus to work, jog at lunch, take the bus home, go for an evening bike ride, punch myself in the dick, have a healthy balanced dinner and in bed by 9.
“With natural ingredients”
Always my favorite
For sure. Peanut butter isn’t much better.
I mean, even the worst peanut butter brands are still mostly peanut. Like, they definitely add sugar and soybean oil to them, but, not to that extent. And it’s fairly easy to find peanut butter that is only peanuts without being 4 times the price.
I’m telling about the kind of peanut butter most people buy. For instance, according to the Skippy peanut butter site, two tablespoons of Skippy has 4g of added sugar, which is about a teaspoon. It’s not Nutella levels for sure, but it’s still a lot.
Roasted peanuts (91%)
No comparison to Nutella.
Can make own at home, with a blender.
Roast your own nuts of choice.
Roasted Almond. Great.
Roasted Almond with roasted Hemp kernels. Great.
Roasted Almonds with roasted Hemp kernels, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, with a dash of chocolate, chilli, turmeric and white pepper… Great.
Taking the junk from the corporation… Not so great.
Much more fun exploring what ingredients go in your food, rather than have the corporation choose for you. They don’t choose for you. They choose for themselves, at you. You end up with junk instead of food.
Much more fun making your own. Healthier, cost similar, more nutrition, and no where near as much nutrientless white crystalline addictants… unless you want that, and can add sugar back in if you want. (Roasting makes it sweet though. Top tip. Healthy sweet.)
Just almonds, roasted, then blended smooth at a medium speed. Try it. See which wins your taste test.
Good thing I don’t just eat the stuff by itself right out of the jar and finish the whole thing in a single sitting.
Once read a thread where someone was asking the best way to eat it. There were suggestions like on toast, or with banana slices. But the best answer—and the one that had me laughing in tears—was:
With your whole hand.Oh god who would do such a thing!?! Next you’d tell me some people would scrape their fingers all around the inside of the jar and lick them making sure they get every last remaining chocolate of that sweet sweet nector of the gods. And even stick their tongue inside, making out style with the jar, making sure no more chocolate taste left 🤤
And even stick their tongue inside, making out style with the jar, making sure no more chocolate taste left
Ladies, are you having trouble getting your man to go down on you? Boyfriends hate this one simple trick!
All that sugar sounds like asking for a yeast infection.
Couldn’t be me
I am Italian and, living in Scandinavia, apart from being mostly disgusted by the other chocolate spreads, I am always very surprised to see the office managers, offering breakfasts on select days, defaulting to a teaspoon in the Nutella jar.
I grew up with a taboo for that and the only way I would ever have Nutella is by scraping some with a knife-side and spreading it thinly on a slice of bread.
It’s funny to see people do such things and then coming with the question: “you Italians have pasta, pizza and Nutella and you still manage to be so thin. How?!”
Check your portions.
Yeah as a Norwegian I’ve always been a bit weirded out when thinking about chocolate spread for more than two seconds. Tbf, I feel like you’re making it out to be more normal than it is (but idk how it is in Sweden or Denmark). Among adults I very very rarely see chocolate spread on bread. Among children however… Not great for their nutrition. I think most parents think “better they eat something than nothing” but I’d argue maybe that’s not always the case.
On another note: holy crap the regional chocolate spread (nugatti) is like 10 times better than nutella. Nutella households are weird.
I think most parents think “better they eat something than nothing” but I’d argue maybe that’s not always the case.
yeah, it’s more a “we finally got them to eat something. calories are calories dammit” on our end.
There are more varieties of hazelnut chocolate spread in Germany than there are stars in the sky. Not all of them, but most of them, are better than Nutella.
some are also hilariously cheaper, i just checked and the store brand here is literally 70% the cost of nutella…
To be fair I definitely think Nutella used to have better ratios because it used to taste better.
I make my own now with far more hazelnuts
Big agree on Nugatti. It’s so much better. I feel similarly about kvikk lunsj over kitkat.
I liked nugatti zero, but apparently it doesn’t exist anymore?
I’m pretty sure a little sugar is better than starving to death.
Yeah I mean I agree, and I don’t judge parents for “giving in”. I was a really difficult kid myself when it comes to food.
There’s a Turkish supermarket near me and the hazelnut spread there is amazing. It’s 50% hazelnut and 10% cocoa with no palm oil
A bakery near me does their own “nutella” with less sugar and bo palm oil. It’s so much better
Food does have ingredients, yes.
Palm oil is bad though. Besides that, I get what you mean
sugar is worse (to your health)
I am expendable, the planet isn’t. Don’t destroy our natural resources for palm oil production
Ultra-processed palm oil is bad.
Palm oil is bad because rainforest is burned down to grow more monoculture palm oil. https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/sustainable_production/palm_oil/
Also cruel to monkeys or something.
Well orangutans live in the forest that is burned down
Because it’s being used for mass ultra processed foods. I was really just referring to the difference between that and the palm oil that’s used in traditional African cooking. Its like soy or corn or any other crop that’s being used for capitalism rather than just feeding people.
I think this is a fair point. There’s palm oil in shit that has no reason for being in there lol
This basically describes all agricultural:
- Clear wild land
- Implement monoculture
This has been discussed before. Clearing out steppes and prairies is different from clearing out rainforest with its extreme biodiversity.
i also think it matters in which country it’s done, fucking up other countries to give yourself luxuries is more distasteful than fucking up your own back yard.
Good to know that there is at least some amount of real cocoa and hazelnuts in there.
Why the fuck does it cost that much?!
Because people will evidently pay that much for it. No idea why.
Why the fuck does it cost that much?
most stores have a generic version which is almost identical
mine’s literally 30% cheaper, every time i think about the purchasing habits of the average person i have to go watch cat videos to stop the red mist from taking over and waking up with bite marks in the furniture
One of the biggest things about capitalism is that they charge what people are willing to pay in order to maximize profit. Capitalism encourages this behaviour.
If you ever baked anything or made desserts this is no surprise. You always have to cut the sugar amount in half.
I think it’s better just to make and eat desserts less frequently than try to mess with the sugar ratios, especially with baking. Like if you want something healthy maybe make a fruit tart instead of something that involves something like Nutella or cake icing where it’s supposed to be very sweet.
why would i eat it less frequently when i can just make it healthier and enjoy it all the time? that makes absolutely no sense to me
If it’s actually good tasting to you, and everyone who is going to eat it genuinely feels the same, go for it. But like, ever tried eating a rhubarb pie with most or all of the sugar omitted? It is horrible and a waste of food because the bitterness of the rhubarb needs to be balanced by the sugar. You can’t just take any recipe and cut out the central ingredient and expect to get palatable results. Making something else instead is the safer option.
Also though, it is worse for you to eat smaller amounts of sugar consistently than a large amount of sugar all at once rarely, the former makes a better environment for bacteria growing on your teeth, and sugar is addictive so making a habit of just having a little on a regular basis will likely result in eating more overall than you otherwise would have.
Naaah, it works alright.
In some cases fucked up amounts of sugar are integral for the receipt (e.g Kouign-amann), but in most other cases (e.g cheesecakes) it is there just because author thinks it is the right amount.
Bakery is a spektrum and less sugary bakery have even more rights to exists than over-sugared.
I use way way less sugar in anything I bake, especially like apple pies, of which I use zero sugar. Once your palette adjusts it tastes good, you can taste the natural sweetness of fruits and vegetables.
Strange…My hazelnut spread doesnt contain that…
Just as if Nutella is just cheap shit^(Sadly it costs three times as much for half the volume. But it tastes 10 times better)
Not sure if I’d trust a brand that can’t spell “Milchspuren”.
Italian brand that exports to Germany.
Probably not even meant for the german market but rather german speaking part of Italy and was imported.
Mine doesn’t either, because, yanno, it isn’t Nutella (it’s Nudossi)? This is about Nutella.
I am communicating that there are way better spreads to buy that arent 60% sugar and taste better.
Nutella is AI slop but for bread.
10% cocoa, 35% sugar.
Nutella prides itself on the low cocoa content, but the buttload of sugar is everywhere.
Hm…my spread (in the picture) says 60% hazelnut and 35% sugar…
The spread in the picture, as per the label, contains 60% hazelnuts, 10% cocoa and the rest must be sugar (~30%), but the percentage isn’t mentioned explicitly.
of 100g, 40g are carbohydrate of which 35g is sugar.
Aka 35%It doesn’t math. You can’t have 105% of the spread in the tub.
The label clearly says 60% hazelnuts + 10% cocoa. So that’s already 70%. How do you squeeze in 35% of sugar in there?
Something is wrong with that label. I don’t trust anything it says anymore. But more likely I’m just dumb at math and nutrition.
Does cocoa or hazelnuts contain sugar naturally and that’s why it goes to 35%, meaning 5% of hazelnut or cocoa content is actually sugar.
Hazelnuts have about 4-5% sugar in them, so it maths out perfectly to 100% total with 30% added sugar.
Nuts and cocoa also contain sugars, which make up the 5%. Those are the nutritional values, which state the total content - there is already some sugar in the contents before the sugar is added.
Hazelnuts have ~60℅ fat, so that spread is still 35% suagr and 35% fat overall. Definetly better than the added palm oil in in nutella, but the health difference is pretty minor.
I’m fact if we go by calories per serving, yours should be worse since fat is more energy dense than sugar.
(But yes, the taste is definetly better and I would much rather have that at least contains mainly hazelnuts)
Nutrition is so confusing. Giving broad categories such as healthy or not healthy deserves way more nuance. Sure, if someone is sitting around all day every day, going crazy on a jar of this it’s usually unadvisable. But if you’re out hiking for the day, or going for a day’s mountain run, this would be an extremely good idea to take.
Palm oil = deforestation.
Or is that just propaganda to prevent palm oil from taking to much marketshare?
You need at least 3 times as much farmland to make an equal amount of any other form of vegetable oil.
Most farm oil used in Europe is from sustainable farming, Indonesia makes 50% of the palm oil on the global market, and they claim to have regulated palm oil farming to be sustainable.
Palm oil is an excellent oil, it is efficient to grow because of very high yields, and it’s been used for thousands of years.I heard that palm oil plantations deforest where orangutans live and I wouldn’t want to destroy their habitat. Why can’t America grow palm oil instead of so much corn and soy beans?
Well, I hope you are correct and that there are no reasons for Indonesia to be lying about that.
Demand has only gone up in the past few decades. It’s in more and more highly processed foods.
I don’t think any of this changes past deforestation, either.
Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It’s not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.
it’s also quite nice to grow more things domestically because it means you have some regulatory oversight and the money you spend will stay in the local economy and thus might make its way back to you.
Like if companies start using domestic canola oil, that means canola farms might open near you, where YOU could get a job and get money to buy things like food and housing! very cool
Nearly all agriculture clears wild land and replaces it with monoculture.
Yup. And it increases as demand increases. Palm oil has seen a surge in use, replacing other things, over the last few decades. This is due to trans fats being phased out. So we traded one major problem for another.
More hazelnuts than I expected! 🌰
In Nutella?
I was most surprised when I finally had some and discovered it was basically just chocolate jam.
21 grams of sugar in a 37 gram serving, so >56% sugar by weight
no wonder it’s delicious 😆
European here. Sorry, but it is so ridiculous that labels don’t just show some standardized “per 100 g” so things are easily compared without math.
Imagine how we feel in the US being given numbers interchangeably in ounces and pounds. Nothing like dividing random numbers by 16 in your head in the store. Grams would be so much easier for this purpose.
Yeah same opinion here, guess they cant make it easy for people to know what they put in their bodies or they might start caring right?
At 57% sugar, it is no longer a bread spread but a flavored sugar mix
Have you seen how much sugar jam needs to be preserve?
Fruit jam alone is usually 1:2 and at best for certain acidic fruits 1:3You don’t need any sugar to preserve, you just need to cook it at 15 lbs of pressure for an hour and a half.
Not how preserves work.
That is how any food works actually. You don’t need sugar to preserve things.
We’ll see when you catch botulism :)
And you’ll probably not make it 100% sterile.
so if cooking it doesn’t kill germs, what exactly do you eat?
You have no idea what you are talking about, pressure cooking kills botulism. You have never canned food before clearly. You are just luck louis pasteur isn’t on this thread.
Too much refined sugar is bad. Too much fat, particularly saturated fats, are bad. When you put them together, they work synergistically to fuck you up so much more. But everyone zeroing in on the sugar exclusively, pay attention. There are 4 calories in a gram of sugar, and 9 calories in a gram of fat. In one serving that’s 21 grams of sugar times 4, which is 84 calories from sugar. By contrast, even though there is less fat by volume at 12 grams, it still amounts to more calories than the sugar at 108 calories per serving.
And notably only 1 gram of fiber per serving.
I don’t even remember what Nutella tastes like, and even when I did try it I never understood the hype. If I were trying to make a healthy alternative, I would blend together a mix of hazelnuts, walnuts, oats, cocoa, dates, and however much needed water to get the desired consistency. I don’t feel like added fats should be necessary (nuts are already naturally high in fats), but if I wasn’t satisfied with the results, I might try using a little canola or avocado oil. Knowing me, I’d probably squeeze some flax in as well.
Calories are not just numbers, it matters where it comes from, and sugar is a worthless source of them, while fat is something the body needs. Palm Oil is awful though, everyone should be boycotting it. But the body doesn’t feel full until it gets an amount of fat, the brain needs it for proper functioning.
Fat was blamed for the ills of sugar our entire lives by the sugar industry in fact.
You’re just spouting half-baked influencer nonsense. Sugar is not a demon, carbohydrates are literally the primary fuel that we run on, and virtually every cell in our body uses them. It’s the improper consumption of carbohydrates outside of their natural, intact, whole-food context; as well as within the context of an overall diet that tends to be high in heavily processed foods, extremely low fiber, low antioxidant and other phytonutrient content, way too high in animal products which come packaged with too much saturated fats, especially cured meats, and in lifestyles with other significant risk factors like sedentary, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption.
Fat has its place, but its role is mainly an emergency store for periods of starvation. Our bodies use these fuels differently too. For example if you look at textbooks on fitness training, they might talk about the myth of “the fat burning zone.” Think of our body’s energy consumption like a set of dimmer switches. The body does not switch between one or the other like a binary, it’s more that it will use differing ratios of all energy sources based partly on activity level. If you’re doing low impact activity like walking or, even just existing, the body will tend to prefer burning a ratio of calories from fat. If you move to higher impact activities, your body will start burning a much higher ratio of calories from carbohydrates. Although going back to that point about the fat burning zone myth, it must be stressed that it is a myth - you’ll burn a lot more fat with higher impact exercise despite the body using more carbs because the overall volume of calories burned is way higher than with low impact, especially if you do something like HIIT.
There is good reason that even relatively conservative fitness organizations like NASM say right in their textbooks - carbs are equally, if not a more important nutrient than protein.
And yeah, the communication about fats in the 80s and 90s was poor. But that doesn’t mean one macro is magically innocent and the other is evil. In the big picture, experts were recommending Mediterranean style diets all the way back then. Industry did not listen. Sure some products were reduced fat - mostly the unpopular ones. And yes they raised sugar levels. But overall, both refined sugar levels, and fat levels have increased in processed food levels over time - especially saturated fats, and when it was legal, trans fats.
But yeah, palm and coconut oils are awful. They’re being put in too many things, and it won’t surprize me if we’re going to start seeing a dip in vegan health outcomes because of that.
Carbohydrates and sugar are not the same thing, no matter how many times you regurgitate sugar industry pervertions.
Lol. Sugar industry perversions? My anointed sibling, you replied to a comment in which I recommended a list of ingredients to make a healthy Nutella alternative - not a single one of which was sugar.
And okay, carbs aren’t sugar. Except they also are sugar, because all carbs are made of sugar. That’s the point, that the substance itself is not evil or unhealthy. It’s the inappropriate consumption and other relevant lifestyle factors that are.
For example, overconsumption of fats - namely saturated fats - increases insulin resistance in the body. This effect amplifies the harmful effects of sugar. Sugar does not cause diabetes apart from obesity.
Anointed sivling eh? None of that is accurate, brother.
All of it is accurate.
Sugar causes diabetes. Carbs are very different in your body then sugar, and it looks like your post was edited, idk about fat causing diabetes as you typed, never heard that.
