I spotted these at a bakery in Chelsea Market in New York City.
Would a kid want to eat Ernie’s hair or Cookie Monster’s eyes or Elmo’s nose? Maybe yes, maybe no — I guess it would depend on the child’s age and feelings about Sesame Street characters.
And, what about all of the food coloring — and the fat and sugar necessary to mould the shapes of these cupcakes?
Eye appeal — but what about health appeal?
Easter Eggs: The Confectionary TypeThey’re everywhere and at every price point. Some are piped with flowers and others are wrapped in foil. You find them in supermarkets, discount stores, and fancy candy stores.
Easter is the second ranked holiday for candy purchases in the US (just behind Halloween) and solid, hollow, and filled chocolate Easter eggs are some of the most popular choices of Easter candy.
I don’t want to be a killjoy, but chocolate is a high calorie, high fat food.
Here’s the stats for some popular chocolate eggs:
The health benefits in chocolate come from cocoa and dark chocolate has a greater concentration than milk chocolate. White chocolate, without any cocoa in it, is not really chocolate. In a recent study, German scientists followed 19,357 people for at least 10 years and found that those who ate the most chocolate, (average 7.5 grams a day or .26 oz), had lower blood pressure and a 39% lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke than people who ate the smallest amount (1.7 grams or .06 oz a day).
Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, contains flavonols which have antioxidant qualities and other positive influences on your heart health. It can be heart healthy if it replaces an unhealthy, high calorie snack, but there is still no recommended amount for health benefits.
Just a heads-up: Those delicious, pastel wrapped chocolate Easter eggs are caloric and moderately high in fat, one-third of it the type of saturated fat that isn’t heart healthy. Extra ingredients like crème and caramel fillings can add lots of extra fat and calories.
Jelly beans — little nuggets of sweetness that come in multitudes of colors and flavors. Their gummy insides might have originated centuries ago from the treat, Turkish Delight. Their outsides are basically the same as the colored hard candy coating, developed in the late 17th century, for the Jordan almond. The modern jelly bean appeared during the American Civil War when Boston’s William Schraft encouraged sending candy to Union soldiers. Because of their egg shape they became popular as Easter candy around 1930.
Although standard jelly beans come in fruit flavors, there are now so many flavors — some goofy, some sophisticated — like spiced, mint, gourmet, tropical, popcorn, bubble gum, pepper, and cola. They also now come in a sugar free version (seems weird, but true – wonder how many chemicals are in those).
Jelly beans are primarily made of sugar and also usually contain gelatin, corn syrup, modified food starch, and less than 0.5% of citric acid, sodium citrate, artificial flavors, confectioners glaze, pectin, carnauba wax, white mineral oil, magnesium hydroxide, and artificial colors (takes some of the fun out of them, doesn’t it).
They may give you Technicolor insides, but they are fat free. On average:
Oh, Oreos! We must love them because we eat 20.5 million of them a day.
Over 491 billion Oreo cookies have been sold since they were first introduced on April 2,1912, making them the best selling cookie of the 20th century.
They were first baked at the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) factory, which dates from the 1890’s, that runs from 15th to 16th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in New York City. Now called Chelsea Market, it is a bustling office and food complex. This photo is of an Oreo label that is showcased in the main lobby.
Nabisco’s new idea for a cookie was two chocolate disks with a creme filling in between. Early Oreos looked a lot like today’s Oreo with just a slight difference in the design on the chocolate disks.
Originally they came with either a lemon or vanilla creme filling. In the US they cost 25 cents a pound and were sold in cans with glass tops so customers could see the cookies. The vanilla creme filling was more popular and production of the lemon filling was discontinued in the 1920s.
Today they come with a whole bunch of different fillings like mint, chocolate, caramel; double stuffs; chocolate coatings; and colored holiday fillings.
Oreos weren’t the first sandwich type cookies on the market. Sunshine introduced Hydrox in 1910 two full years before Oreo’s debut. But it seems that Sunshine fell short in its marketing because Hydrox never became as popular as Oreo and production stopped in the mid 1990s.
One of the keys to Oreo’s success is its interactivity. Think about it – you don’t just eat it — you can dunk it, bite it, or twist it apart. Oreo lovers, psychologists, and food writers have all speculated about whether the way someone eats their Oreo indicates a personality type.
According to a History.com video, in 2004, Kraft (Nabisco is now a Kraft brand), surveyed over 2000 Oreo eaters and found that they are divided into three categories:
The survey also discovered that more women tend to be dunkers while men tend to be biters. And, Democrats tend to twist, Republicans tend to dunk!
A serving of regular Oreos, 34 grams, has 160 calories, 7g of fat (2 saturated), 25g carbs, 1g protein,1g fiber, and160mg sodium.
According to the Nabisco label, there are about 15 servings in an 18 oz. bag. After checking lots of sites, the general consensus is that there are around 3 cookies in a 34 gram serving. It sure would be nice if Nabisco would give us the stats per cookie rather than for 34 grams so the consumer could have more useable information!
I was recently helping a client learn how to interpret nutrition and ingredients labels of food products. He clearly wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of spending the extra time to read labels.
It does take time. But, you don’t have to do it for everything. It’s particularly important to get a feeling for products that might have a laundry list of ingredients.
It’s also really important if something screams “healthy,” “loaded with fiber,” “reduced calorie,” “contains a day’s worth of nutrients,” and a whole host of other “you’ve got to buy me because I’m great for your health” claims.
There just might be a kernel of truth surrounded by a great big blob of calories, sugar, chemicals and other stuff.
My client pulled out an Oats and Chocolate Fiber One Chewy Bar that his wife had bought for him. She thought that with140 calories per bar and a label emblazoned with “35% daily value of fiber,” it must be a good snack.
According to the nutrition label, each bar has 140 calories, 4 grams of fat (1.5 grams are saturated fat), no cholesterol, 95mg of sodium, 29 grams of total carbohydrates (9 grams of which are dietary fiber and 10 grams are sugars), and 2 grams of protein.
The calorie count isn’t bad, there isn’t too much sodium, there are 9 grams of fiber, but there are also 1.5 grams of saturated fat and only 2 grams of protein.
The ingredients label: chicory root extract, semisweet chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, natural flavor), whole grain oats, high maltose corn syrup, rice flour, barley flakes, sugar, canola oil, glycerin, maltodextrin, honey, tricalcium phosphate, palm kernel oil, soy lecithin, salt, nonfat milk, fructose, malt extract, cocoa processed with alkali, baking soda, caramel color, natural flavor, mixed tocopherols added to retain freshness.
Hmmm: It seems that eight ingredients are sugars or forms of sugar: # 2 (semisweet chocolate chips), 4 (high maltose corn syrup, 7 (sugar), 9 (glycerin), 10 (maltodextrin), 11 (honey), 17 (fructose), 18 (malt extract).
Not only are there a whole lot of ingredients for a 140 calorie bar, there sure is a whole lot of sugar. Nine grams of fiber may be 35% of the daily recommended amount of fiber, but this bar is filled with sugar – 8 of its ingredients are sugar and this measly140 calories is using up a full 10% of the recommended daily value of sugar for a 2000 calorie diet.
The 35% of your daily fiber label on the front of the package is true – BUT – with this much sugar, 1.5 grams of saturated fat and only 2 grams of protein, is this a healthy food?