Latest Fact Sheet

Season 2, Ep 7 - Crackers and Biscuits

Last year New Zealanders spent almost $335m on 140m packets of crackers and biscuits. They’re so popular that 99% of households have bought at least one packet in the last year.

Chocolate biscuits are our favourite, making up almost 25% of our biscuit and cracker purchases.

Some biscuits can be very high in sugar. To work out what percentage of a product is sugar, look at the number of grams of sugar per 100g on the nutrition panel.

Crackers can be quite high in fat – some are almost 30% fat which is higher than chocolate biscuits or pizza.

Saturated fat isn’t good for us because it raises our levels of bad LDL cholesterol which makes us more likely to suffer from heart disease. However, another type of fat is worse than saturated fat – trans fat. This type of fat also increases LDL cholesterol but it decreases our good HDL cholesterol at the same time.

Luckily, trans fat is uncommon in New Zealand – saturated fats are much more commonly used here instead.

0.7% of New Zealander’s energy intake comes from trans fat which is beneath the World Health Organisation’s

recommended limit of 1%. On average, New Zealanders eat over 35g of saturated fat each day. The recommended limit for the average adult is 24g.

A UK physicist, Dr Len Fisher, has conducted a lot of research into biscuit dunking. He recommends dunking biscuits on a flat angle for around five seconds for best results. He also found that biscuits taste better having been dunked in milk rather than in tea or coffee.

A range of biscuits contain colourings, including many that you wouldn’t expect. Plain biscuits can contain colouring to keep them looking consistent. The best way to establish whether a product contains colourings is to check the ingredients list.

There are three different types of flavouring. Natural flavours are unmodified and come from animal or plant matter. Nature-identical flavours are made in a lab but are an identical replication of a natural substance – imitation vanilla essence is one example. Artificial flavourings are made in a lab, usually to imitate a natural flavour.