Glucoholic - Sugar Free Snacks

We’re really glad to be bringing you Edy’s No Sugar Added Fruit Bars today. Frozen treats are a summer favorite for many. Thankfully the low carb options for these treats continue to grow, and these fruit bars are a good example. Winner of one of the 2008 ChefsBest awards, these fruit pops made with real fruit taste great. You can really taste the fruit in the strawberry, tangerine, and raspberry flavors. We thought the tangerine had the strongest flavor, but all three flavors were truly fantastic. They come individually wrapped and provide a cool, refreshing, low carb snack on a hot day.

Serving size is one fruit pop. Each popsicle contains 30 calories, no fat, no cholesterol, and no sodium. Each popsicle also contains about 6 grams of digestible carbohydrate, including one gram of fiber. You’ll get one gram of sugar, so it’s not a completely sugar free snack. Edy’s No Sugar Added Fruit Bars are sweetened with Splenda and acesulfame potassium. As a bonus, they also provide 25 percent of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin C. We’re glad to recommend these low carb snacks to help keep you cool this summer.

It is so good to see so many sugar free snacks showing up on the grocery store shelves these days. This time of year we are particularly interested in the frozen variety, and today’s review wins a blue ribbon in that category. PhillySwirl Sugar Free Vanilla Cream Stix are fantastic! We could stop there and feel totally comfortable with the review; but truthfully, we just can’t stop talking about these things. Each box of these wonderful frozen treats contains three flavors of vanilla cream swirled goodness. More on that in a moment. We found these sugar free snacks to be most readily available at Sam’s Club. They usually cost less than seven dollars for a box of thirty. That’s less than a quarter for each snack people. And well worth it if you ask us.

Nutritionally these snacks are a home run as well. Serving size is one frozen snack. Each serving contains only 14 calories, 7mg of sodium, and 3 grams of sugar alcohol. They are sweetened with Splenda and acesulfame potassium. With these kinds of numbers the only danger to your health will be from eating half the box and ending up in the rest room all afternoon. Seriously, we can’t remember a taste-to-nutrition ratio this good in all our previous sugar free snack reviews.

Let’s take a closer look at the three flavors.

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The return of warmer weather puts The Glucoholic in the mood to start seeking out some new low carb frozen treats that will help him make it through the long, hot months ahead. Six Until Me blogger Kerri Sparling got us started with her recent blog post about sugar-free popsicles. After reading it we were on a collision course with the freezers in our local supermarket. Fortunately, the low carb section seems to be stocked better than we remembered it. Our fortune will soon become your fortune.

The first thing we saw that we just had to have was Blue Bunny’s Sweet Freedom Black Raspberry Ice Cream Bars. You might be asking “why didn’t you review the Edy’s Fruit Bars from Kerri’s post?” Don’t worry - it’s coming. We can only consume so many low carb snacks in one week! Seriously, Blue Bunny’s Sweet Freedom Black Raspberry Ice Cream Bars are absolutely delicious. The chocolate shell and the raspberry ice cream are perfect together. Each bite tastes like that wonderful final bite of a raspberry Tootsie Roll Pop, and you don’t even have to make the investment in licks to get there. This is a great low carb snack.

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It’s been a while since we did a protein bar review so we went in search of the latest and greatest in low carb snack bars. We were fortunate to find a new offering from a familiar face. The Atkins Advantage Caramel Chocolate Peanut Nougat Bar looked interesting, and ended up being a really good buy. This bar is a very good combination of chocolate, peanuts, and caramel. The nougat is somewhat understated, and does not leave you with the dried out feeling that some of the other Atkins bars do. The caramel is sweet and seems to add a little moisture to the mix. There are more peanut pieces than we were expecting, and the peanut flavor is not overwhelmed by the other ingredients. Actually, the peanut taste lingers for quite some time after finishing the bar, which is a bonus as far as we’re concerned. This is definitely one of the better tasting Atkins products we’ve tested, and we’re glad to recommend it.

Serving size for the Atkins Advantage Caramel Chocolate Peanut Nougat Bar is one bar. Each bar contains 170 calories, 11 grams of fat, and 150mg of sodium. One bar also contains 115mg of potassium, 8 grams of digestible carbohydrate, 11 grams of fiber, and 10 grams of protein. Each bar also contains between ten and twenty percent of the recommended daily intake of quite a few vitamins and minerals. The product contains soy, milk, and peanuts; and is made in the same facilities as other products that contain peanuts and other nuts and seeds.

We’ve had good experiences with Kraft South Beach Diet products in the past, so we thought we would give them an opportunity to continue their winning ways by trying out the South Beach Living Fiber Fit Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies. We realize the sizzle can leave the steak as soon as you mention the “f-word”, but fiber is an important element in any diet. What better way to sneak some in than having some fiber-filled snacks? These little cookies were quite enjoyable, and come in convenient 100 calorie packs containing about six or seven quarter-sized cookies. This doesn’t sound like a lot of food, but we’ve tried several of the competing 100 calorie snacks, and most fall short of South Beach Living Fiber Fit Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies in terms of satisfying hunger. The chocolate is a great complement to the oatmeal, and the combination tastes sort of like a chocolate-dipped ginger snap. We do recommend having something to drink with this low carb snack, as the cookie can leave your throat a little parched and scratchy. We’ve noticed this before trying to drink powdered fiber with too little water in the mix, so it could be all the fiber in the cookies. During testing, just a sip of water with each cookie totally eliminated this problem.

Serving size is one 100 calorie bag of cookies. Each serving has 5 grams of fat, 80mg of sodium, 30mg of potassium, and about 11 grams of digestible carbohydrate. A serving also contains one gram of protein and 5 grams of fiber. The cookies contain milk, soy, and wheat for those readers with allergies. We’re very happy to say that Kraft’s South Beach winning streak is intact, and we’re also happy to recommend these cookies for those who might be looking for a more pleasurable way to get more fiber in their diets.