MYTH or FACT blog: Regular, full cream milk has less sugar than reduced fat or skim milk

Did you know there’s no added sugar in reduced fat milk?
The sugar content is comparable to plain, regular full cream milk.

Plain milk (full cream, reduced fat and skim) only contains one ingredient – milk! It does not contain ‘added’ sugar unless it is sweetened such as flavoured milks (e.g. chocolate). As part of its natural composition, all plain milk contains a naturally occurring sugar called lactose and this is the sugar you will see on the nutrition information panel.

When comparing full cream, reduced fat and skim milk the only difference is in the fat content, see below:

• Regular, full cream milk contains a minimum of 3.2 per cent milk fat.
• Reduced fat milk contains approximately 2 per cent milk fat.
• Skim milk can contain no more than 0.15 per cent milk fat.

When the fat is ‘skimmed’ or removed from the milk to create the ‘reduced fat’ and ‘skim’ versions, the overall volume of the product is reduced but the natural sugar content remains the same. This means the percentage of lactose (and other nutrients) per 100 grams will be higher in skim and reduced fat versions as compared to full cream milk.

*The information in the table above has been compiled using foodstandards.gov.au.

As you can see from the table above, the sugar content is only marginally higher in reduced fat and skim milk as compared to full cream milk – with the main difference being in the fat content.

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