New Zealand-made dairy milk drinks have more sugar than Coke and Red Bull - are they just as bad?

As we hold out hope for a hot Kiwi summer, there’s one item we’ll likely be buying a lot more of to keep us cool in the coming months: single-serve drinks picked up from a dairy, petrol station or supermarket on our way to the beach or a sunny backyard barbecue.

According to Countdown data from last year, sales of these drinks increased by almost 12 per cent over the Christmas period - and we can all agree that summer was a bit of a fizzer, to say the least.

Soft drinks and energy drinks are high sugar products that are typically consumed quickly. This means the sugar gets absorbed all at once leading to a spike in blood sugar levels. Image / NZ Herald

While many will be inclined towards what we know are high-sugar soft drinks, juice or energy drinks, you might be surprised to learn they’re not the ones that rate the highest on the sugar scale.

For years, the likes of Coke and Red Bull have been lambasted for their sugar content. But a Herald review reveals there’s another category of beverage that pips them on the sugar front: New Zealand-made flavoured milk.

Puhoi Valley's caramel-and-white-chocolate-flavoured milk and Lewis Road Creamery's chocolate-flavoured milk. Photos / Puhoi Valley, Lewis Road Creamery

While Coke contains 10.6 grams of sugar per 100ml and energy drinks Red Bull and Monster have 11g and 11.4g respectively, it turns out they’re no match for the sweet stuff found in two of New Zealand’s favourite dairy brands’ offerings: Puhoi Valley’s caramel-and-white-chocolate-flavoured milk has 12.8 grams of sugar per 100ml and Lewis Road Creamery’s chocolate-flavoured milk comes in at 11.5g.

The only thing that sits between them is Countdown’s own-brand ginger beer at 11.7g. For comparison, Bundaberg ginger beer has 10.6 grams.

But is the sugar content created equal?

A spokesperson for Puhoi Valley explains: “The natural lactose in milk contributes to the total amount of natural sugars in it, at 4.7 grams per 100ml. The rest (8.1 grams per 100ml) of the sugar comes from the real white chocolate and caramel sauce.

“Milk naturally provides essential nutrients including protein, B vitamins and potassium, and is high in calcium. It doesn’t make sense to compare it to products with little to no nutritional value.”

Similarly, Lewis Road Creamery general manager Jason Clements says, “Around a third of the sugar content in our chocolate milk is naturally occurring lactose found in our fresh whole milk. The remaining sugar content comes from milk chocolate.”

He explains that the chocolate makes up for “approximately 7.3 grams per 100ml, and the lactose, from milk, makes up the remainder of approximately 4.2 grams per 100ml, giving a total sugar content of 11.5 grams per 100ml”.

Clements also notes: “Unlike soda and energy drinks, whole milk also naturally contains nutrients like calcium, protein, and vitamins like B2, B12, D and folate. In fact, some elite sports people use our chocolate milk as a post-race recovery drink.”

However, Dr Andrew Reynolds, a senior research fellow at Otago University who has published extensively on health issues in relation to dietary carbohydrates, says while the sugars that naturally occur in milk aren’t an issue, what comes with the added flavours is.

“Unflavoured milk is around 5 per cent naturally occurring sugars. These aren’t really an issue, and when drinking unflavoured milk, you also gain beneficial nutrients like protein and calcium. The problem with the flavoured milk drinks [identified] is that they are more than doubling the amount of sugar and more than doubling the amount of saturated fats, two things that most people in New Zealand consume too much of.”

It's better for children to know and enjoy the taste of standard milk rather than be given flavoured options, a New Zealand dietitian says. Photo / Getty Images

He says both sugar-sweetened drinks and sweetened milk beverages “make it difficult for people to meet the WHO [World Health Organisation] guideline of less than 10 per cent total energy. This guideline is in place to reduce risk of weight gain and dental caries”.

Currently, New Zealanders are consuming, on average, double the amount of sugar we should be.

“For the average person in New Zealand, our sugar intake accounts for 20 per cent or higher of our total energy intake - so we can say that most of us need to considerably reduce our sugar intake.”

How we do that, says Reynolds, is by focusing on added sugars “rather than the sugars found naturally in foods like ripe fruit. Chief among the sources of added sugar in our diet that recommendations target to reduce [are] sugar-sweetened beverages”.

He says there are five strong reasons for this stance:

“First off, they have a lot of sugar in them. Second, they are not a source of any important other nutrients that we need to obtain from sugar-sweetened beverages. Third, they are a liquid we typically drink pretty quickly, so the sugar gets absorbed all at once, leading to a big spike in blood sugar levels that our body has to quickly respond to. Fourth, sugar-sweetened beverages do not contain any other nutrients like fibre, which would slow down how quickly the sugars are absorbed into the body. Fifth, there are viable replacement options for sugar-sweetened beverages that are the same price: artificially sweetened beverages, or cheaper - water.

“Because of the first four reasons, sugar-sweetened beverages are actually the source of sugar in the diet we have the strongest evidence for in causing harm to our health …”

And while flavoured milk may be something parents see as a happy medium between a healthy drink and a treat for their children, Auckland dietitian MaryRose Spence advises against introducing it to children.

“Flavoured milk is very sweet. I would prefer that children get used to the taste of milk. This is just the food environment we’re living in, that you get them into the sweet foods, and it’s a shame to expose our young ones to that. They’re much better to know what milk is.”

She says if you were to track a group of 10 Kiwi kids under the age of 10 who weren’t overweight, by the time they reached 47, half would be overweight or obese.

“What they drink is a very big factor in determining that, because it doesn’t give us any fullness. You know, it’s got no fibre and it’s got no protein in it. It’s just a short-term fuel. So it makes our blood sugar levels go up and then dumps it quite quickly. In terms of behaviour too, it’s not ideal.”

The Herald also queried Countdown on its home-brand ginger beer, which has the second-highest sugar content of the beverages surveyed.

A spokesperson said while the product doesn’t contain caffeine like some other soft drinks do, the “nature of a ginger beer drink” is such that “a bit of sugar” is needed “to balance out the ‘spiciness’ from the ginger”.

However, they say Countdown is “conscious of the sugar content of our sugar-sweetened soft drinks, and are in the process of reducing the sugar of all our sugar-sweetened soft drinks (pure sugar reduction without the addition of sweeteners)”.

The move follows a trend in beverages, with more producers creating sugar-free or low-sugar options or the likes of New Zealand company Six Barrell Soda’s sugar-free Seltz Drops, used to add natural flavours to sparkling water.