I have bought this Cerelac product by Nestle out of curiosity because I have read that in developing countries it has added sugar (about 25-28 grams) which is either sugar or honey but it Germany and Switzerland for example, it contains no added sugars.
In the list of ingredients, I can't see to find any sugar, honey or sweetener of any sort. It contains about 25 percent of powder milk which can have a certain amount of naturally occuring sugars but it is impossible for it to be as high as 28 g per 100g because that's like cake level sugar amount.
So I'm just wondering if I missed something since if this was just a mistake, then it would be quite strange given the fact that this is a baby food product and should be subject to strict regulations.
by Qr7t
29 comments
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The Wheat flour. Carbohydrate rich food contains a lot of sugar per default. Also as you said: The milkpowder too.
Flour is basically starch, a complex carbohydrate.
I imagine that the “teilweise aufgeschlossen” (literally: partially unlocked) here refers to splitting up the long-chain carbohydrates into shorter-chain carbohydrates, some of which can be sugars.
It fits. 100 g of powdered milk contains abt. 38 grams of sugar, sometimes even more. This is 25 % that – it is 400 g so theres 100 g of powdered milk
Magermilchpulver contains 38g of sugar per 100g.
It’s Laktose
Flour and milk.
The flour is treated such that some of the normally long carbohydrates are chopped into smaller parts and sugar are very short carbohydrates.
“Magermilchpulver” – skimmed milk powder has a lot of sugar. Googled it and there are numbers between 40-60g per 100g, so yeah pretty high.
Milk powder contains lots of sugar
Nestle was/is caught adding sucrose and other form of sugar in Non-european countries, which is forbidden in EU and other developed countries.
[https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/17/nestle-adds-sugar-to-infant-milk-sold-in-poorer-countries-report-finds](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/17/nestle-adds-sugar-to-infant-milk-sold-in-poorer-countries-report-finds)
Milkpowder.
Lactose present in milk is a sugar.
lactose
The thing is: not all sugars are the same thing (as in, not all of them are sucrose, which is what you are thinking of when talking of cake, and that itself is made of two sugars: glucose and fructose. You can also buy either of these two sugars as ingredients).
As others have written: milk alone has a lot of lactose, which is a sugar and other ingredients have other sugars. The chemical name of most sugars ends with “ose” in English, if you really want to search which sugars exist in which ingredient.
And of course, not all sugars have the same effect in the body or are processed equally.
The carbs in the wheat flour were spliced into sugars (thats what the “teilweise aufgeschlossen” means), and milk powder is sugar (lactose) to a large part, as well
White flour is starch and “aufgeschlossen” meant shorter sugars.
To the OP, please define “sugar” better in your question. Do you mean specifically sucrose or generally sugars in a broad chemical sense?
There are different columns in the nutrition facts. There is one where just 100 g of just the powder is listed and one with 100 g of prepared food.
Since only water is added to prepare the food, the prepared food naturally has a lower sugar content than the unprepared powder.
Midwife told us only to feed PRE milk in the first year, others are not regulated by law and may contain whatever the producer likes to.
What is your source of info that it doesn’t have added sugar? Seems to me that they have not disclosed all the ingredients in the (about 30% of it) ingredients section. But then have to disclose all nutritional info where the added sugar shows up.
Milk is full of sugar! Lactose 🙂
From the milk? Milk is rich in LactOSE. The -ose morphem indicating that that’s a sugar. 🙂
So there you go. That’s the sugar they disclosed.
the wheat flour („teilweise aufgeschlossen“) can contain suggar (Maltose) and the milkpowder also contains suggar (lactose), but I think it is just the wrong lable printed there, because technically in germany there is only the saccharose declared as suggar in those lists.
Aufgeschlossen means that they used the enzyme amylase to turn starch into sugar.
I mean isn’t wheat and milk basically a sugar mix
It’s from the milk.
Also don’t buy Nestlé, there’s more than enough alternatives out there.
There are a lot of types of sugar.
Technically speaking our body runs on sugar (glucose).
So yeah…probably comes from the milk (lactose, also a sugar)
Let’s talk about the “cake level” thing. Yes, cake can definitely contain around 30% sugar. This powder also contains about 30% sugar. The difference is: You eat a piece of cake, the baby does not eat an equivalently large amount of the powder. You can see on the second picture that when the powder is mixed according to the instructions, the final product contains 14g of sugar per 200g, that is 7%. I just checked the PRE milk mix we use and the final product also contains 7% of sugar. I’ve looked up breast milk, and “coincidentally” it’s also 7% sugar.
In conclusion, the sugar content alone does not hint at this product being unhealthy. Maybe the type of sugars is, but that’s a different topic.
The Milk powder. lactose is the sugar in milk. There is a difference between “no added sugar” and “no sugar”.