Fruit yogurt is a typical source of hidden sugar. All the sweetness of fruit yogurt doesn’t really come from the fruit but is most likely to come from added sugar. Therefore an often repeated suggestion is to buy plain unsweetened yogurt eat it either as it is or add some fruit yourself. Doing this you’re 100% sure your fruit yogurt actually contains a decent amount of fruit and it’s free from added sugar.
Making a switch from fruit yogurt to unsweetened plain yogurt is often a high hurdle to take, especially for people with a sweet tooth that are not used to the natural flavor of yogurt. I often get the complain that plain yogurt is tasteless. The easy solution would be to use some sweeteners like stevia or aspartame, but it doesn’t fix the problem of you eating too many sweet foods. Also, it doesn’t let you get used to different flavors. Believe me, once you’re weened of sugar, yogurt does have a good taste!
Plain unsweetened yogurt can be flavored without adding too many extra calories to make it more palatable without sugar. You just need to be creative. Here are some ideas.
Mocha yogurt
If you’re a coffee fan this might be a good solution for you. Add half a teaspoon of instant coffee to your cup of yogurt and you get a whole new product that tastes like mocha. To make it easier to mix the coffee under yogurt you can dissolve the coffee first in a tiny bit of boiling water before adding it to the yogurt.
Vanilla, rum, or other flavor extract yogurt
If you ever made a cake, you know what I’m talking about. You can find all kinds of flavor extracts in the baking section of the supermarket. Just one teaspoon of a flavor extract of your choice can give a whole different flavor to your yogurt. My favorite is yogurt with some vanilla extract. Make sure to get the liquid form, vanilla sugar is also used to make a cake, but this product contains extra sugar (which was not our goal)
Cinnamon yogurt
Cinnamon is often used to top pudding, but it goes also perfectly well with yogurt. If you want really fancy yogurt you can first add some vanilla extract to the yogurt and then top it off with cinnamon.
Choco yogurt
Instead of using half a teaspoon of instant coffee, you could use half a teaspoon of pure cacao. Make sure to use real cacao and not the instant types that are often used to make chocolate milk for children (type Milo, Nesquick, Ovaline, etc.), these mixtures often contain added sugar. To make sure you have the right product read the list of ingredients.
If you have some great ideas of yourself make sure to let me know 🙂