Pickled Gherkins
Food · Vegetable · Food, Typed Supps
Twenty-three grams of added sugar per hundred. In a pickle.
Stage by stage
- Sweet and sour (Taste): The brine supplies both, and the sugar is what makes it taste balanced.
- Barely a vegetable (Stomach): 0.9 g of fibre and essentially no vitamins survive the process.
- Added sugar (Circulation): 23 g per 100 g, more than a soft drink by weight.
- Sodium (Systemic): 520 mg per 100 g from the same brine.
Timing
Nothing to time. The choice between sweet and dill is the entire intervention, and it is made in the aisle.
Time to effect
- 15–30 min: Glycaemic response at meaningful quantities.
- Per 30 g: About 7 g of added sugar and 156 mg of sodium.
Allergens
Contains: Sulphites. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.
Satiety
130 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — moderate. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.
Environmental footprint
0.5 kg CO2e and 108 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Other vegetables" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Cheap — roughly £2.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 105
- Protein: 0.4g
- Carbohydrate: 24.4g
- of which sugars: 23.6g
- Fat: 0.3g
- Fibre: 0.9g
- Sodium: 520mg
Food vs. supplement
Free-sugar audits fail on savoury foods, because the mental category is wrong. Gherkins are where that fails hardest — a pickle nobody counts carrying more sugar per gram than the drink they gave up.
Kitchen tip
Look at the sugar line on the jar. Sweet and dill gherkins sit side by side and differ by about 23 g per 100 g.
Common myth
“Pickles are just cucumbers — basically a free vegetable.” In reality: Australian gherkins are usually sweet-pickled, at 23 g of added sugar per 100 g — more than a soft drink by weight — plus 520 mg of sodium, for 105 calories against a fresh cucumber’s 12. The cucumber contributes 0.9 g of fibre and almost nothing else. Dill pickles keep the crunch and the salt and drop the sugar entirely.
Recipes that use it
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