That healthy breakfast – it’s actually full of sugar

WHAT did you have for breakfast this morning? Some of the options considered the healthiest choices may actually be packed with sugar. Here are some of the worst offenders.

● Smoothies: While any jumbo sized serve of bright green liquid certainly looks healthy, it contains a large number of ingredients and an extraordinary amount of sugar. The key is to keep the size small and stick to just three or four ingredients at most.

● Acai bowl: The brightly coloured mix of acai puree, crunchy granola and fresh fruit, nuts and seeds makes an acai bowl look so healthy but it could be renamed a ‘sugar’ bowl with the levels of sweet ingredients. It is the mix of apple juice, fruit, sweet granola and acai puree that creates such a high sugar breakfast option which is really more like a dessert nutritionally.

● Muffins: If you made your own muffins at home and used wholemeal flour, fresh fruit in place of sugar and included some nuts and wholegrains a muffin would be a relatively good option but the average jumbo sized muffin typically found at cafes is more likely to contain 30–40g or 6–8 teaspoons of sugar.

● Banana bread: There is nothing healthy about cafe banana bread. With 20–30g or 5–6 teaspoons of sugar in a single slice, if you enjoy your banana bread with your favourite milk based coffee your breakfast will contain at least 50g or 10 teaspoons of sugar, which is more than we should be consuming in an entire day.

● Yoghurt and granola:

While a plain natural or greek yoghurt is relatively low in sugar, most fruit yoghurts are full of added sugar. If you add extra fresh fruit and sweet granola you will have another breakfast that contains 40–50g or 8– 10 teaspoons of sugar.

Susie Burrell