(Sara Chodosh/ Popular Science) — Health halos are powerful. They convince us that granola laden with maple syrup is healthy and that anything gluten-free must be better for us than the gluten-full version.
It’s fairly easy to cut through these halos by looking at the nutrition label—but let’s be honest, most of us don’t. Yogurt feels healthy because of all those beneficial microbes, so we just figure it’s all pretty healthy—especially if it’s organic.
But as a recent study in the British Medical Journal shows, that intuition isn’t always a great guide. Researchers in the U.K. decided to survey yogurt available in British supermarkets and compare the nutritional profiles of each, and found that many of them were packed full of sugar. Even seemingly wholesome, organic products can contain half your daily recommended dose of the sweet stuff in one tiny little cup.
“People don’t realize how much added sugar is in their diet,” Andrea Giancoli, a registered dietitian and dietary policy expert, told Popular Science earlier this year. “We know some obvious culprits, but not the ones that are less obvious.” (…)