Warning: Muller Light’s Worse Than We First Thought

Maybe you've been a member of slimming world for a while now, and you want to know a little more about things, or you may have just joined, and you want to learn more about the syn free & free foods you're allowed to eat, in particular Muller Light yoghurts, and how many you can eat safely. Well you've come to the right place! I'm going to strip mullers down to the bare bones and expose them for what they really are, are you ready?

Slimming world’s going great I really can't fault it. I’ve currently lost just over 4 stone (58lbs/26kgs), and I’m really getting into things; in particular, learning about the foods that i'm eating, and what's in them. At first it was simply curiosity, but now it's more of a need, I need to know what I’m putting in to my body, and what's its doing to me.

Your body needs the right fuel

I don’t know if it's a good thing, but I'm thinking of my body more as a machine, a machine that needs certain “fuels” to keep it running well, especially if I expect it to do things I've never done before. I want to be fitter, leaner and strong than ever, and for that to happen I need to make sure I’m giving my body what it needs.

Sure there's gonna be times when I eat junk food. It's who I am. I love food, and some of the tastiest food in the world (that I love) is unfortunately junk food. I'm not going cut that out completely, life's too short for that and it's simply not a realistic way to live in today's world, is it?

On a whole all I want to do is eat as healthy as possible while being realistic, I’m not talking about those odd days off we all have, I just mean majority of the time.

Syn Free...Really?

So on the slimming world diet Muller Lights are classed as a “syn free food” which in theory means you could eat as many as you wanted as they have no syns. This sounds great on the surface, but something that concerns me is the amount of sugar Muller Lights contain.

Before I go any further I’d like to make it clear I’m not writing this with the intention that slimming world will allocate them syns, GOD NO! I love Muller Lights; I want to find out and share with you, what’s in them, what eating too many of them can do to us, and how many is a safe amount to eat.

Like I just said I love mullers, and I usually eat two with my lunch every day. I have been known to eat up to 6 in a day when I'm craving something sweet or I'm waiting for dinner and I don’t want to go off plan. Mullers are probably the easiest thing to grab on the go, and that’s the main reason I eat a lot of them, it's probably the same for you, right?

Can you eat unlimited Mullers?

I finally found the poster that spurred me to look at muller lights in detail, and write this article for that matter. This poster clearly states (take a look below) you can eat an "Unlimited" amount of muller light yoghurts!

I'm not gonna spoil the rest of this article for you, but this is just crazy advice if you ask me, that's right I'm calling slimming world out! It's a green light for fat people to swap one addiction, chocolate for instance, for muller lights, and that's not healthy.

10 Muller Light's per day!

While doing a little research online to find out if there is a limit to how many mullers we should be eating it was interesting to see that there are loads of slimmers out there looking for an answer just like me, and you. I didn't find an answer, but I was shocked to find there are some people out their eating 8-10 muller lights per day! Now I know without even looking at any stats, eating that many has got to be bad for you, hasn't it?

What do the experts say?

The Food and Drink Federation have extensively researched how much nutrients we as humans should be eating as part of a balanced diet. They've put together a Guideline Daily Amount chart also known as the GDA, obviously this is a guideline and isn't 100% set in stone for everyone, we're all different, but its safe to safe its pretty spot on for most of us. As you can see from the picture below, amounts vary for men and women but overall their pretty similar.

You know the labels you see on most products in the supermarket, something like the one below. This is where we find out what's in the muller light (or whatever you're looking at) and how much of our a percentage that pot counts towards our recommended daily nutritional intake.

What's in mullers and how damaging are they?

Now we know how much we sugar (and other nutrients) we should be eating as part of a healthy diet, and we also know where to find the nutritional values for muller lights, we now need to take a deeper look into the numbers to work out how many we should be eating.

As you probably know there's loads of different muller light flavours (Turkish delight and cherry being my personal favourite), meaning the nutritional information varies slightly from flavour to flavour; to keep things simple I'm going to use the vanilla flavour as a base for the stats below.

As you can see in the picture above, there’s 12.3g of sugar in each pot. That equates to 13.6% of a women's and 10.25% of a man's recommended daily amount (GDA) of sugar according to the F&D Federation (chart above)!

"Just reading how bad #mullerlights are on #slimmingworld, its shocking http://ctt.ec/ajet6+ on @darranmansfield blog"

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Am I the only one that’s finding that astonishing? 13.6%/10.25% of a whole days recommended intake for sugars. Knowing that each pot contains 12.3g of sugar, and that I’ve eaten up to 6 pots some days, that's a staggering 73.8g of sugar, or 82% of my recommended daily amount!

?

?

82% just on muller lights, that’s crazy isn’t it, tell me it's not just me!

What’s worse is the people that I told you about eating 8-10 mullers a day, which is excessive how ever you look at it. If you were to eat 10 muller lights in one day like some people are, that works out to 123g of sugar entering your body, and if that’s not bad enough, you will have consumed 136% (women)/102% (man) of your recommended daily intake! That’s insane. That's over a day and a quarter’s recommended allowance!

It's only sugar right? What's the problem?

Sugar is wonderful, almost beautiful in a strange sort of way. It can make the dullest of foods taste out of this world, so how is it something that tastes so good can be so god dam bad...literally evil towards us.

We know that eating too much sugar is risky to our health, but I was shocked to find out the full extent of what it can do, do you know what too much can really do to your body?

It can cause things such as,

• Type Two Diabetes
• Damage blood vessels
• Nerve Damage
• Organ Damage
• Heart disease
• Stokes
• Retinopathy
• Kidney disease
• Foot problems
• Sexual dysfunction
• Miscarriage and stillbirth

Holy cow! All jokes aside that’s a scary list. Did you know too much sugar could do all that? I think I speak for both of us here, when I say we want to stay as far away from that list as possible; no one wants those health problems do they.

It's just not worth it

It's safe to say from the stats we've just gone over, eating too many muller lights is bad for us, and could almost certainly harm our health in the long run.The big question still exists though, how many can we eat per day safely?

To tell you the truth it’s not an easy question to answer; there's so many variables to consider, thing such as current health conditions, age, weight, activity level, and your diet. Our diet is the biggest variable that needs to be looked at from a personal level, no ones going to be the same. What you’re eating throughout the day that include sugars will determine how many you can safely eat.

Sure there's going to be people out there eating a lot of sugar within their daily diet, and if that's you then you probably shouldn't eat too many mullers. On the flip side to that, if know your daily diet doesn't include that much sugar, eating three or four muller lights wouldn’t be that bad every now and then.

My Thoughts

It all boils down to the old saying, everything in moderation. Personally I'm going to limit myself to one or two per day. I can't see eating one or two muller lights a day harming you in the slightest as long as the rest of your diet is healthy and in moderation. I wouldn’t advise eating four, five, six…ten muller lights a day. That WILL certainly harm you in the long run as we’ve discussed above.

How many do you eat? What's the most you've eaten I one day?

That was pretty eye opening right, did you know there was that much sugar in a muller?

Do you know someone that loves muller lights, that could benefit from this article? Share it with them, they'll love you!