Welcome to episode three of Sneaky Nutrition! Watch the video and/or read below for the whole transcript.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone and welcome to episode three now of Sneaky Nutrition. Now this is going to be a quick one. I think my baby's going to wake up very soon and I've got a whole lot of work to get through in the meantime. So a quick one for you guys, okay? And this is one that I think even though it's short you are going to love, it is how to choose a healthier chocolate so you can have chocolate more often, if you want to of course. I mean I personally like to have just a little bit of chocolate every day or two, so I'm in that category of chocolate lover, okay?
Now chocolate has some really great benefits for you. If you have a good quality version with some good quality cacao or cocoa, then you are going to be scoring a whole bunch of antioxidants, some magnesium and a whole bunch of other vitamins. So it can be a really great product, but it can also be a terrible product not too far from a jelly lolly, okay? So I want to just give you the heads up, and no it's not just about milk verse dark, because there are a lot of commercial dark chocolate products out there that say they have 60 or 70% dark chocolate, but they still are more than 50% sugar. And that is probably worse than a milk chocolate, because usually the darks are a little bit heavier in fats, et cetera, so you end up with more calories and the same amount of sugar, which don't need that.
So if you are looking to like me have a healthier chocolate every day, obviously if you are in an area where you can source and can afford the most amazing brands, like Pana Chocolate and Loco Love. Loco Love oh my goodness would spend my last $5 on that. But anyway, aside from those guys and beautiful dark organic brands, the commercial brands that I promised you I would stick to, I'm not going to name names, but well for the bad ones anyway. But let's just say that the majority of milk chocolate on commercial supermarket shelves, and a lot of the dark chocolates from the big brands too, are more than 50% sugar. Not only that, but their other ingredients are just not cool either. I'm not a big, the sugar is total devil person, but if I'm going to have sugar I sure as hell want to make sure that I am enjoying it, that it's in the right, take it in the right zone not just scoffed into my face every day.
So when it comes to those brands, often you'll see that sugar is the first ingredient and that's a big no, no. Then if you want chocolate, you want the chocolate ingredients to be the first ingredients, not the sugar, but for a lot of those big brands the sugar is the first ingredient. There's a bit of cocoa in there. And then they follow up with all sorts of flavours and syrups and chemicals and numbers like E4 whatever. So it's not even just a sugar, that's a problem, it's that it also has a whole bunch of other fake flavours, fake chemicals and weird stuff in there. So some of the brands that don't, again, if you can afford those beautiful organic conscious brands, amazing. I love so many of them. But if you are going to the general supermarket, you want to ideally look for a dark chocolate. And you can wean yourself on, you can start at 70% which still tastes quite milk chocolaty, wean you're up to 75, 80, 85, 85, 90, 95. I actually think that 90% of some of them taste better than the 80s, so there you go.
But team, it is a process of weaning yourself onto the darks, but it is worth it. So if you look at some of the major big milk and dark brands, the ones that are not so great,.if you turn it over and look at the nutrition panel, look at the hundred gram column always, because that's the easiest way to tell. If I look at the hundred gram column, and I can see that there's 56 grams per a hundred grands, that means there's 56% sugar in the product. And immediately I know that's not going to be great. If I look in the a hundred gram, what's it called? What did I just say it was called? The hundred gram part, whatever it is, and under that it says that it has 10 grams of sugar per a hundred grams. Well, I know that's a low to medium sugar product. For your information, anything with five grams or less per hundred grams of sugar is a low sugar product.
Up to 10 is kind of, okay. So if there's, nine or 10 or 11 grams of sugar per hundred grams, I am pretty happy with that from a chocolate perspective, because it's rare that you would eat a whole hundred grams. Look at this box, that is a hundred grams to give you an idea. So I wouldn't go eating the whole thing, unless it was a real rare occasion. So that's a hundred grams. When it comes to, for example, a big block of a Cadbury or whatever that might be 170 grams. So you probably wouldn't eat half of that. You'd feel pretty sick. So you're looking at the hundred grand panel, you're looking for things that are as close to, I mean if you can find a chocolate with single grams of sugar per hundred grams of product, that is a winner. And take that home and have your squares do that each day, okay.
Because that means most of the product is going to be made up from cocoa. So that's awesome. Now if you, there are a few out there, like for example I wrote down here when I had to look at the nutritionals. If you look at this one actually, so Lindt 85%, that has 11 grams of sugar per a hundred grams. If you go up 5% to the 90%, it has seven grams of sugar per a hundred grams, and the 95% they've just released has 2.9 grams per a hundred grams. So anything was single digits per a hundred grams is an automatic winner, but if that is way too bitter for you at this stage of your health journey, then even something that has single grams of sugar per serve, and if you stick to that serve will be really great. Now unfortunately a lot of those big major commercial brands that are milk chocolate, still have 17 grams of sugar per serve.
Now to give you an idea, most of them closer to 20, right? To give you an idea, there's five grams of sugar, five grams of sugar equals one teaspoon like that. I've used an old fashion teaspoon, because a lot of the new ones are too big. So this is an old fashion teaspoon, and basically a flat teaspoon of that is five grams of sugar, if that makes sense. So if you had what, when I looked at the back of the packs, most of the commercial brands out there had somewhere between 50 and 60 grams of sugar per a hundred grams. If I break that down into a 30 gram serve, this is the difference. Not even between the really dark chocolates, but between a commercial brand and something like this, at around the 85% level. Okay. So can you see this?
Let me just bring my phone up and over. So you can see here, that if you're listening, you'll just have to listen spoon it out yourself at home. But you can see here that big pile on the left there, that's per serve for the sugary ones. And then that little one that's per serve for the 85%. And then if I look again to go lower, so let me just spoon that out for a minute. If I look for something like a 90 or 95% literally, and I'm not using sugar by the way, I'm using a dark cocoa, so you can see it clearly. That's about how much you'd have per serve. So there's a really big difference. And of course managing your sugar levels is really important for not just your body shape, because sugar does make you, I mean it's a very easily stored product.
It's also easy to burn off, but you've got to work it, okay. But if you're having a lot, it just overwhelms your body, it overwhelms your liver. Your liver is your primary fat burning hormone, but it also is responsible for a lot of other stuff that makes you feel good. Too much sugar will do the reverse of support your immune system, so you're likely to get sick more often. There's just a lot of negative things if you're really overdoing it. So if you are a chocolate lover, it is worth looking for those bars that have single digits per a hundred grams of sugar, or single digits per serve. Okay. It makes a really big difference to the impact that nutrition choice has on you.
I can have two to three squares of that per day, and it won't impact my health. But then if I go and have a block at the same amount, which is different, because the squares of the dark ones are bigger. But if I went and had the same amount of grams in a milk chocolate per day, I'm not only getting the sugar, I'm getting the chemicals, I'm getting all that kind of stuff, okay. Again, maybe not always relevant if you're having one of those healthy brands, but the fancy ones. But if you're doing your general commercial buys, then yeah, you want to be aware of it. Now, just as a last point on this one, it doesn't fix the problem to just have the sugar-free brands. I'm doing the little inverted commas thing, for those of you listening. The sugar free brands of chocolate look, some of them are okay to have in small amounts, but a lot of them, I mean none of them really... To make it taste good, they need to use the really hardcore artificial sweeteners, that just destroy your gut health to be honest.
So things like mannitol which is just, oh my God. If you ever have too much mannitol, you will know about it. You are going to be bloated and farting, and just feeling terrible. Okay. So there are so many nasty artificial sweeteners out there. And you don't want too much anyway. The good artificial sweeteners that I think personally from my own journey, they're my favourite ones at least, are Stevia and monk fruit. And it's pretty tough to find in the commercial supermarkets brands that use that. So that's just my little tip. This is another, I mentioned Lindt. And look, I like Lindt, because it just has some really good dark quality brands. They've got 70, they've got 85, they've got 90, they've got 95. It's a product that I am comfortable eating regularly. Most of them have low sugar and some of them have really low sugar. So that 95% is officially in the very low sugar category, which is cool. I mean it's less sugar than in a carrot, which I'm pretty happy with.
There's some other good brands. I found this organic brand in the supermarket too, Alter Eco, this is their 90%, it has nine grams of sugar per a hundred gram, or about just under a teaspoon. If you're going to have about that 30 gram amount. Okay so that's just a really easy way to think about it. I would dare you to measure out, have a look at the back of your pack, and measure out how many teaspoons of sugar are in your favourite per serve, or per a hundred grams. And please note, that one line of a lot of the milk chocolate brands out there that are commercially produced, has the same amount of sugar as that whole pack. Wow. Another cool thing to know guys. If you look at the back of some of your muesli packets, your fancy muesli packets, they'll often have more than 50% sugar per a hundred grams too. So it's worth keeping this in mind, that you ideally want single digits of sugar per a hundred grams of any product, but particularly the ones that you might be having every day.
I hope that helps you a little bit, when you're selecting your chocolate. It's a really easy glance at the back, and make sure you as well check, looking at this one. The first ingredients here are cocoa mass, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, vanilla, and then a bit of sugar. Pretty cool. If I look at one in the naughty ones, first ingredient, sugar, palm and Shea oil, sunflower oil. Oh my God. There are numbers, then cocoa butter then flavours. Okay. You get the gist. A little change here. You can still have your chocolate, and it will now have health benefits for you. Okay. This is the difference between drinking a whole lot of wine every day, or eating a few grapes. Alright, enjoy guys. I hope that helps you choose a healthier chocolate, next time you go to the supermarket. And if you work your way up to 95% tell me about it. Especially if you started at milk. I'll be very impressed. Alright. Bye guys. Enjoy all the sweets, but the not sweet sweets.