Food Fiction Fun

whitpauly wrote: »

This is fun! Anyone find any others?

I'm sure there are some excellent granola bar vs. candy bar possibilities.

As the OP, I want to shift gears and clarify where I was coming from in posting this. If someone enjoys Belvita or oatmeal raisin cookies, and those fit into an overall way of eating that gives them the right number of calories and good overall nutrition, I'm all for it. No criticism intended!

Personally, I rarely eat either - can't remember when I last had a PF oatmeal cookie (though I like them), and I've tried the Belvita but didn't personally find them appealing taste-wise. Both, with respect to how I like to eat, have a splurge level of calories for the level of nutrition. Either one (based on calories/nutrition) would be a "rarely" food at most.

They each have around 10-12% of my daily calorie goal, but only 4% of my protein goal, and pretty trivial micronutrients. The cookies possibly have hydrogenated oil (trans fats - but presumably less than 0.5g per cookie because the label says zero): That's a serious minus. Still, if forced to choose between just these two, with their similar nutrition, I'd pick the cookies as tastier to me personally.

The main reason I posted it was that the calories and nutrition are surprisingly similar, given how very differently the two are marketed. That's the part I find funny. Usually, I personally find most manufactured multi-ingredient foods to have too little nutrition for their caloric cost, and to be not that tasty. But that's purely a personal tastes and preferences thing - I completely respect that other people have different dietary needs and taste preferences.

If there's any takeaway here - and it ain't rocket surgery - it's that how something is marketed may have only the loosest possible relationship to what it actually is/contains, and that it's important to read labels. Calories are a precious and limited resource (if I want to stay thin!), so I want to spend them thoughtfully.