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Refrigerated Cookie Dough

by John McGran & Becky Billingsley

Mr. Bad Food and Mrs. Good Food enjoy sweets, and they know many sugary traps that can wreck a reasonable nutrition plan lurk in the grocery store. This month Mr. Bad Food tells you about refrigerated cookie dough that is nothing but nutritional trouble, but Mrs. Good Food has great news regarding a new frozen pastry.

 

From Mr. Bad Food:

Nestle Toll House Mini Chocolate Chip Cookies

It used to be the word mini meant wonderful things. Mini skirts are tops in my lecherous mind. I’d love to have a Mini Cooper and pretend I’m super-cool trained assassin Jason Bourne (but I’d probably look more like nerdy Austin Powers). And mini choppers are some of the neatest cycles for my biker kid. Heck, I’ll even admit to a childhood crush on Minnie Mouse.

But when it comes to food, the word mini puts me on guard.

First of all, I don’t have a mini appetite. If I’m going to eat something, I want a reasonably-sized portion. I don’t have to overeat (although sometimes I do), but I want to have enough of a food so my hunger pangs are quelled.

So here we have Nestle Toll House Mini Chocolate Chip Cookies. I hate them already. You just KNOW the serving size is going to be ridiculously small.

And I was right. A serving is three one-bite cookies. Three bites! That’s just plain insulting to a guy named Mr. Bad Food!

And it gets worse. The nutrition facts for those three bites: 160 calories, 8g fat (4 saturated), 15mg cholesterol, 130mg sodium, 21g carbohydrate (13 sugars) and 1g protein.

The irony here: the front of the package brags that these cookies have zero grams of trans fat. Big freaking deal! They still sock me with 20 percent of my daily saturated fat allowance… and I get it in three bites!

Chew on this: I’d rather have ONE full-size Toll House cookie with its 108 calories and 6.2 grams of fat. It just feels more substantial and I’d be less likely to sneak “just one or two more”. 

 

From Mrs. Good Food:

Knot fattening!

I picked up a box of Papa Ciro’s Handmade Cinnamon Knots thinking it would be a treat I could hand over to Mr. Bad Food for his Bad Food Reviews. But a look at the nutrition facts shocked and amazed me!

Each knot with icing has 111 calories, 1.7g fat (zero saturated or trans), zero cholesterol, 141mg sodium, 20g carbohydrate (2 fiber, 6 sugars) and 3g protein.

That’s not bad at all for a cinnamon bun-type product. But they aren’t really buns, because the bread is harder in a pleasant crispy-and-flaky way.

For $3.49 you get eight 28g knots and a 1-ounce packet of icing. The knots are already cooked; all you have to do is warm them up in the oven for about seven minutes. You zap the icing packet for 10 seconds in the microwave, drizzle it on the hot knots and enjoy.

For goodness’ sake: My fear was that the knots would be tiny, but they aren’t. Each is good for about six blissful bites, which is a wonderful low-fat breakfast treat to have once in a while with your fresh fruit and high-fiber cereal. They’re even nice as a light dinnertime dessert.

 



Note: This information was accurate when it was published. Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the businesses in question before making your plans.

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