"diet food" news and stories

An article in today's USA Today discusses how dieters face many pitfalls when shopping for diet-friendly foods in the grocery store, because there seems to be some confusion over what constitutes diet-friendly, "health" food.

Notice that I said "health" and "diet-friendly," as opposed to simply healthy foods. This is because the article isn't about increasing the proportion of nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables in the diet. It's about how dieters who eat things like YoCrunch's fun yogurts fail to loose weight. YoCrunch is a brand of low fat yogurt that comes with mix-ins that include crushed Oreo cookies, M&Ms and Reeses Pieces.

I'll venture out on a limb here and say that the dieters who believe that eating any product with candy mixed into is a "healthy" thing to eat are fooling themselves. Just because the yogurt is low fat, that doesn't mean that the crushed-up candy is, too. And beyond that, pretending that it is a "health food" is just silly. Is a product like YoCrunch better than, say, a deep fried Snicker's bar? Of course, but if that's your dieting criteria, you might have to reconsider before you actually lose any weight.

Source

Last week, I tried the Klondike brand Slim-a-Bear Ice Cream sandwiches in my early stages of a search for a "diet" ice cream that I could include with my Spring, ahem, lifestyle change. It wasn't horrible, but the Slim-a-Bear definitely tasted like it was intended to taste - "light."

A couple of commenters recommended the Skinny Cow low fat ice cream sandwiches, which I promptly snatched up at my local market, and they were right - much better than the Slim-a-Bear. The chocolate cake part tasted about the same, but I don't think it's the sandwich part that ever really packs on the fat and calories. The ice cream part was better. It certainly didn't taste like a smooth and creamy ice cream - it had the texture of a slightly icy frozen yogurt, which is much better than the melted-refrozen airy sponge texture of the Klondike bars. At 140 calories each, not a bad "diet" treat.

It's "98% fat free." It's diet food.I know. I know, but sometimes you just have a tiny scoop of hope in the bottom of your heart that maybe, just maybe, this might be the one. This Klondike Slim-a-Bear just might be the one light thing to save your get-ready-for-Spring self, and taste good, too.

To begin with, ice cream sandiwches in general aren't exactly gourmet desserts, particularly since they are almost always out of a grocery store package from some mass-marketed frozen-treats producer. But I have a soft spot for them, I guess the same way most people have soft spot for something that takes them back to thier childhood.

These were, to be quite honest, not great, but not all that bad for being 98% fat free and 130 calories each. The chocolate cake part tasted exactly the same as any other ice cream sandwich. The fat free part must have been in the ice cream, which had the same consistency of ice cream that had completey melted then re-frozen. But if I think about it, I think that's the same consistency it was when I ate them off an ice cream truck when I was eight. I just didn't care as much back then.