A few notes on…

A few notes on low-calorie foods worth checking out:

  • low-carb bread: I love it. Absolutely love it. When toasted, I can't tell it apart from regular bread, and it's a third the calories, so I can eat three pieces instead of one -- it allows me to indulge my gluttonous urges without too much penalty. :-)

  • low-fat cheese: I can eat the entirely non-fat Kraft swiss, but it really doesn't taste much like cheese. I think from now on, I'll stick to the low-fat (60 calories a slice) version. A slice of this on the aforementioned toast makes a satisfying first breakfast for me, for under a hundred calories.

  • Splenda: this is a no-calorie sweetener that I like so much better than Nutrasweet, I can't tell you. Nutrasweet is too sweet, and it tastes weirdly metallic; it's just awful in tea. I can just barely tell the difference between Splenda and sugar, and only if I'm paying attention. If I just use it in my (4) cups of tea every morning, then I save 60 calories right there, with no effort. Love it!

9 thoughts on “A few notes on…”

  1. Have you tried Stevia? It’s a natural sweetener made from a plant, and it doesn’t have any of the possible yucky effects of chemical sweeteners. It’s available in powdered form, has no calories and is best used in teas and baking, because it can taste a little ‘plant-like’

  2. Shanna, I love Stevia. I used to grow it in my front yard, and I always meant to throw a few leaves in when brewing up iced tea for instant sweetner!

    The stuff that makes Nutra Sweet sweet (aspertame? I think?) gives me an instant migraine. Does anyone know if Splenda is made with something different or not?

  3. Splenda contains dextrose, maltodextrin, and sucralose.

    Nutrasweet, if I read their webpage right, is entirely made of aspartame; aspartame is made from two protein components – aspartic acid and phenylalanine, as the methyl ester. So I don’t think Splenda should affect you the way Nutrasweet does — they don’t actually have anything in common.

  4. That’s Splenda’s whole deal, apparently, that it’s chemically identical to sugar, with the exception of one molecular arrangement that causes the body to process it as a no-calorie sweetener as opposed to actual sugar. So the claim is that Splenda doesn’t have the health effects of nutrasweet-like sweeteners (and also still tastes like sugar to people like me who don’t taste aspartame as sweet).

    Mary Anne, I don’t know if your low-carb bread is the same as mine, but I love the one I’m using. Even if I get freaked out a little by the fact that I’m eating bread made with no flour. (how do you make bread without flour? do i even really want to know?)

  5. I had a roomie with a wheat allergy once, and I think she used nut flour to make breads. Or maybe it was cornmeal? It’s been awhile.

  6. i use almond flour to make a quickbread that’s pretty good, and flax seed meal to make crackers. I like Stevia as a sweetener too, but I find that only the brands with more than 80% rebaudioside A (the sweetest of the sweet chemicals in Stevia) are actually edible. The others have a bitter aftertaste.

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