Due to health reasons, sugar should in principle attribute to only a small portion of your diet.
For example, the World Health Organization (WHO), in its updated Guideline for sugar intake recommends restricting the intake of "free sugar"* to less than 10% of total energy intake. This recommendation is based on analysis of scientific evidence, which shows that adults with lower sugar intake have lower body weight, or that an increase in body weight is associated with an increase in sugar intake.
However, in reality it often looks different. Many snacks, and even purportedly protein-containing processed foods, have hidden sugar.
Did you know that, for example some 150g branded low fat fruit yoghurts (fat level 0,7 – 1,5%) contain only 6,2g protein, but 18,3g of sugar – that equals almost 6 standard sugar cubes. If you pay attention to your sugar consumption, you should carefully read the ingredient lists. The different names for sugar on food packaging are varied and complicated and therefore not always easy for the untrained eye to recognise. For example, sugar hides behind ingredients such as glucose syrup and dextrose, to name a few.
For this reason, we have minimised the amount of sugar in our Premier Protein products as much as possible.
A 40g Premier Protein bar for example, contains 50% protein, but only 0,7g of sugar. Even when you mix a shake with 250ml of water with our 100% Whey protein, you only get a maximum of 1.9g sugar. In our table Protein-containing snacks you can compare the sugar content of other protein-containing snacks.
Sources:
World Health Organization: Information note about intake of sugars recommended in the WHO guideline for adults and children (2015): Access January 2018: http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/guidelines/sugar_intake_information_note_en.pdf
Position of the ‚Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung‘ WHO - Guideline (2015): Sugars intake for adults and children; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung e. V., Bonn, 07. April 2015. Access January 2018: https://www.dge.de/fileadmin/public/doc/ws/position/DGE-Position-WHO-Richtlinie-Zucker.pdf*”Free sugars”. These include monosaccharides anddisaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, and sugarsnaturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates