Too sweet, not enough vitamin C
Ökotest checks smoothies: You should pay attention to this if you want to avoid sugar
Many smoothies contain too much sugar
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Actually, the concept of smoothies is great: a colorful fruit salad pureed in a glass. However, the health benefit is not always given: the fruit drinks contain too much sugar and too little vitamin C. Ökotest can only recommend 8 out of 22 products.
Up to ten different types of fruit can sometimes be found in the red smoothies that Ökotest has examined. That actually sounds healthy, but if you take a look behind the facade, the smoothies contain too much sugar and not enough vitamin C.
Although there was no added sugar in any of the 22 smoothies examined, the World Health Organization (WHO) explicitly includes sugar from fruit in its recommendation not to consume more than 25 grams of sugar per day. It would be easy for manufacturers to lower the sugar content. You would just need to mix more red fruit into the fruit drinks instead of mashed bananas.
According to the German Society for Nutrition (DGE), smoothies should contain at least 50 percent fruit puree and should not have been concentrated by removing water. After all, the content of pulp or puree is between 50 and 70 percent, that of juice between 30 and 50 percent.
Some smoothies are as sweet as lemonade
If you want to avoid sugar, you should use smoothies that contain little banana pulp, grape juice or apple juice, according to Ökotest’s recommendation. You should also make sure that the smoothies have less than 10 grams of sugar per 100 milliliters, which corresponds to the sugar content of a lemonade.
Ökotest can recommend eight products with “very good” or “good”, three fail with “poor”. Among the recommendations is the “Dm Bio Smoothie Apple, Elderberry, Aronia & Raspberry” for 1.28 euros and “Rewe to go Cassis Blackberry Apple Smoothie” for 0.99 euros. The smoothies “All in Fruits Yippie! Smoothie Apple Dragon Fruit” for 1.79 euros and “Penny Ready Flamingo Smoothie Apple Banana Dragon Fruit” for 0.89 euros failed the test because the laboratory found the spray poison Captan, which is suspected of being cancerous.
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