What’s Behind that Beverage?

This is a series of food label reading posts with an aim of raising awareness to anyone who is interested to find out more about commercially produced convenience food.

Think about your favorite beverage… 

Do you know how it has been made? Are the ingredients that go into that yummy drink as good as it is to your body? In this post, let’s explore about common ingredients used in the instant beverage industry.

Let’s start with something related to one of the world’s healthiest tea:

Green tea soy latte.

Here are some commercially available alternatives: Matcha Latte Covers_combined

Take a look at the ingredients behind these latte mix….

Instant Matcha Latte 1 _edited

It’s an amazing blend of sugar (14g, not shown in photo), saturated fats (fully hydrogenated vegetable oils), emulsifier, coloring…and finally, the Green tea powders, which forms about 2% of the whole mix. Very loosely, every serving of this latte mix contains about 3.5 teaspoons of sugar and 0.5 teaspoon of green tea powder. Or, about 700% more sugar than green tea.

What are we drinking actually?

Let’s take a look at another one with simpler ingredients:

rishi sweet matcha_Edited

The very absence of fats reduces the calories by 2/3, to about 50kcal. We are still consuming about 3 teaspoons of sugar with every serving. This will increase when we add our creamer like milk. However, here we can choose the type of milk we want to use. And it comes without the artificial flavoring, emulsifier, flavoring.

Can it get better?

Let’s take a look at a final one…Ecolite Matcha Latte_edited

The only added ingredients are soy powder and green tea powder. Naturally occurring sugar found in soy accounts for about 0.5 of a teaspoon. (7 times lower than commercial latte with added sugar). It is rich in naturally occurring soy protein, and naturally occurring polyunsaturated and saturated fats found in soy. Saturated fats is 60% lower than latte with hydrogenated vegetable oil.

A comparison of the nutritional content is shown below.

Instant matcha latte mixes compared1-1

Would you still be comfortable in knowing that you are drinking more saturated fats, sugars and industry artificial as much as ever, instead of the healthy green tea nutrition you wanted to get?

Information is actually everywhere, made easily available to us. The next time you grab an item off the supermarket shelf, take a look at the label. You might be surprised!

We are what we eat. Choose wisely.

Cheers to a larger life!

Jeanne

Published by stayingyoungis

A chemical engineer by training, I am passionate about the study between nutrition and immunology, in particular, through the consumption of everyday fruits and vegetable that is within our nearest freshfood market. Health is wealth, and time is money. On a personal level, if we are healthy, we make the best use of the time to capture the best value. On a global level, a healthy aging population will put less strain on a country's healthcare system and enable better allocation of its resources into other areas.

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