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The contents of a jar of Nutella
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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I'm actually not seeing anything especially surprising here. Does anyone eat a bite of it and not immediately know it's got a ton of fat and sugar in it?
I think the surprising part is that this guy got a jar that was seperated and layered. Mine just comes as one consistant spread.
They sure tried advertising it as a health food in the USA 20-ish years ago when it was relatively new to the market—“simple, quality ingredients like hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa.” They were sued for deceptive advertising and had to pay millions of dollars.
But yeah, one bite or a look at the ingredients and nutrition label should be enough to warn anyone. The first ingredient is sugar and more than 50% of the food’s mass comes from added sugar.
Same in Europe in the late 00s/early 10s anyway - the ads here boasted about it being a good source of slow-release energy to keep you going til lunch
It’s amazing that anyone was fooled by this marketing. It shows you the power of it I guess.
The first time I tried Nutella I immediately knew what it was: chocolate hazelnut cake frosting. The fact that people slather it on their toast every day seemed as absurd to me as eating cake frosting every day.
North America has long had sweet treats as breakfast or early morning food so I'm surprised you're surprised.
Things like Danish, donuts, pop tarts, toaster strudel, breakfast cereal... Etc etc
Hold up the Dutch straight up put chocolate sprinkles onto buttered toast and you're coming at exclusively at the US? And Danish were named after somewhere. Strudel... that sounds awfully germanic... I think Europe is gaslighting us. Also I've had European milk chocolate, holy shit.
The danish aren't all overweight though. 50% of white people in the US are now. 60% or more of the general population last I checked, and it takes an immigrant on average 7 years to become as overweight as the average American.
So something is different.
Sure but not a chocolate cake. Putting Nutella on a piece of bread is basically having a piece of chocolate cake for breakfast.
I mean we have a cereal that’s openly marketed as just a box full of mini chocolate chip cookies
Knowing it has sugar is one thing. Seeing the volume of sugar relative to the other ingredients is still a shock
I guess I've seen so many of these things that I've stopped being surprised. This one was really popular for a long time.
That one can't be real. There's more sugar than could physically fit in the coke can. Like no liquid, just sugar, there's more than 12oz of sugar.
There’s 39 grams of sugar in a a coke can. Sugar is water soluble and 90% of the can is water that can absorb the 10% of sugar.
Hmmm, look at the labels. They each say something something "100".
Not the right language, but maybe something like per 100? Like per 100 grams of water? Or.. something about volume?
IDK, it would be a weird way to do it. But something like that might explain why so much sugar, seemingly more than can fit in the can.
Sugar is heavy, there's no way 39 grams is the same size as the can
Edit: gandalf seems to have the right idea here! https://sh.itjust.works/comment/24686999
Edit2: wait, a can has 300+ grams of fluid in it... So the sugar would be 1/3 of what the whole can would be. This actually makes the picture more confusing 🤔
Edit 3:
Behold, 39 grams of sugar. About one shot glass worth.
Here's that glass next to a can. I don't have any soda pop in the house.
Doing the real science! Thanks!!
thank you for your efforts 🌟
Like, for solid food, 50% sugar is what's typically in sweets, that means 50g sugar in 100g food. 10% sugar (that means 10g sugar in 100g liquid) is what's in sweet drinks like soda.
The WHO recommends restricting your sugar intake to a maximum of 10% of your calories intake. So for solid food that would be 10g sugar per 100g food, assuming the rest of the food is calorie-rich. For liquids it would be virtually 0g sugar per 100g liquid as liquids contain essentially no other calorie source.
There's a shocking number of people who see words like "hazelnuts" and think its healthy like plain hazelnuts.
"With natural ingredients"
Always my favorite
It doesn't help that Nutella has been advertised as being "part of a healthy breakfast".
I mean, hitting yourself in the face can be a part of an otherwise healthy routine.
Yeah, I have a healthy routine. Make myself a nice breakfast and eat it while I read the paper, take the dog out, have a shower, take the bus to work, jog at lunch, take the bus home, go for an evening bike ride, punch myself in the dick, have a healthy balanced dinner and in bed by 9.
The sugar and fat is why I eat it
I'm not surprised by it any more, but only because I've known this for a while now. When I first saw this breakdown (and looked at other sources to confirm), I was caught a bit off guard by the realization that this stuff is well over 50% sugar. The palm oil is not exactly a plus, either.
But it tastes SO sweet...
Well, it was supposed to be mainly a hazelnut cream with some sugar, cocoa and maybe a few other minor ingredients. And in fact, when it was new and conquering markets, that was what it was.
I think the decades starting with the early 1990s had desensitized a lot of us to enormous amounts of sugar, and in the end we didn't even consciously notice anymore how sweet that stuff had gotten.
Many years ago I developed a weird food intolerance called Fructose Malabsorption. Basically, free fructose molecules mess me up, but sucrose (table sugar) doesn't, so among other things I started avoiding things with much HFCS in them. I started getting unsweetened iced tea at restaurants and adding sugar. I was absolutely disgusted by how much sugar you have to add to make it as sweet as a soda or sweet tea. In a regular sized drink cup (american medium), I add three packets, and that is very slightly sweet. To make it as sweet as "normal" I'd easily have to add three times that.
Only it wasn't palm fat until recently. Shittiest oil on the planet, they're destroying SO much rain forest and replacing it with palms.
It tastes like hazelnut cake frosting.