Healthify your supermarket choices.
Five Great Snack Makeovers
This is a guest post by Lisa Cain, PhD, a.k.a Snack-Girl.
We all love to snack. And we love convenience too. Unfortunately that comes with a price – unhealthy additives meant to preserve packaged pastry for months, artificial and cheap ingredients, and unreasonable amounts of sugar, sodium and fat.
I write about about healthy snacks made with real food. Here are 5 of my junk food “makeovers”. The idea is to eat something nutritious and delicious without breaking your wallet. You will have to invest a few minutes in the kitchen though…
1. Great tasting banana bread. Low in sugar and butter free. The key is that the bananas are sweet so you don’t have to add a lot of sugar to make it taste really great, and you use buttermilk which is a great low calorie substitute for butter.
2. Quick and healthy pizza. Here is a really simple suggestion to satisfy a pizza craving and it is an excellent snack size serving.
3. Homemade energy bars (less calories and no packaging). For the price of a bag of flour, oats, and raisins, you can have 24 bars for about the cost of 2 packaged energy bars. Is this savings worth your time? If you make $100 an hour, probably not, but the rest of us could use the money.
4. Homemade microwave popcorn – You CAN make popcorn in the microwave without the prepackaged products from the supermarket. All you need is popcorn, lunch bags, tape, and some flavorings.
5. Yogurt dip with much less fat – a yogurt and dill dip that is truly tasty and has very little calories. The secret is a substitute of the fat filled sour cream that goes into regular dip – Greek Yogurt. It has a thicker consistency than regular yogurt which makes it feel and taste more luxurious.
Lisa Cain, Ph.D., is an avid snacker, foodie, published author, and mother of 2. An evolutionary biologist by training, she has become obsessed with how food contributes to our overall health. Check out snack girl for other healthy snack ideas.
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It’s too bad the authors math is off:
Why make your own Microwave Popcorn? A box of microwave popcorn sells for at least $3 and you will get 4 servings. Ordinary popcorn is about $1 a pound and you will get about 8 servings. ($6 as versus $1 – you save $5!). You will save a ton of money for just a little work.
If you go by the serving size on the package it’s usually 2.5 servings/bag. And where is the $6 coming from. When people pull this crap it makes them seem unreliable. Convince people with facts not speculation.
@Bill
Thanks Bill for the comment. I suppose I should have explained that I worked off of a package of microwave popcorn that was only 1 serving per bag (Trader Joes’ brand 99% fat free). How much you save is determined by the amount in a serving size – next time, I promise to cite my EXACT source for my math. Lisa AKA Snack-Girl