Nutella is one of the most popular and most well-known food products in the world. The brand advertises that it’s made with “7 carefully selected quality ingredients.”
But are there any questionable ingredients in Nutella like artificial flavors? What are the ingredients? Is the product healthy overall? And are there healthier alternatives on the market?
In this article we’ll answer all of these questions and more as we review every ingredient in Nutella based on medical research and give our take on whether it’s healthy or unhealthy. We’ll also share an interesting video visually breaking down the ingredients in Nutella, and a video tutorial on making healthy Nutella at home.
Ingredient Review
As would be expected in a sweet, chocolate spread, the first ingredient is sugar. One serving of Nutella contains 21 grams (g) of sugar and 19 g of added sugar.
We know from medical research that consuming added sugar in excess is associated with a range of negative health outcomes, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We recommend avoiding added sugar as much as possible, and we consider 19 g to be a large amount for one serving, especially considering that consumers are likely to eat more than one serving of Nutella at a time.
Skim milk is a relatively nutritious ingredient, but Nutella makes no reference to whether the milk they use is sourced from grass-fed animals, so we’ll assume it’s not. A medical review published in the Frontiers in Nutrition journal found grass-fed dairy products to be more nutritious than dairy from conventionally-raised animals.
Vanillin is a flavoring agent that’s found in vanilla beans but is typically derived from crude oil when used in manufacturing. We consider this to be one of the safest non-toxic flavoring agents, and while we generally recommend avoiding added flavoring, we can’t locate any medical studies suggesting that this ingredient is harmful.
We have no issues with any of the other ingredients (hazelnuts, palm oil, cocoa, lecithin).
Overall we think it’s a good thing that Nutella uses mostly whole foods as ingredients, but we do consider the product to be unhealthy given the high amount of added sugar.
One of the most popular (and interesting) YouTube videos on the ingredients in Nutella is a visual representation of the ingredients which shows how much sugar is in a full jar. The video has nearly 200,000 views at the time of writing this article:
Our Hazelnut Chocolate Spread Recommendation
The product we recommend for a hazelnut chocolate spread is Eliot’s Chocolate Hazelnut Spread.
It has significantly less added sugar per serving than Nutella (2 g versus 19 g), and is free of flavoring agents. It has a simple ingredient list: roasted hazelnuts, powdered sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, salt.
This is the healthiest hazelnut chocolate spread that we could locate after reviewing the ingredients in all of the popular options. It’s also sold in a glass jar which is better for human health (no potentially endocrine-disrupting microplastics) and for environmental health in our opinion.
Interested consumers can check out Eliot’s Chocolate Hazelnut Spread at this Amazon link.
Make a Healthy Nutella At Home
A popular YouTube channel called “Downshiftology” has a video on how to make a healthy Nutella at home. The video is only 3 minutes long and uses healthier ingredients than exist in Nutella in our opinion:
