It's time again for my favorite snack food tip, popcorn! Popcorn is the best snack for movie watching, superbowl watching or anytime the munchies hit. In terms of snacks, it's a nutritional winner! It's crunchy, tasty, and best of all, we can eat a lot more of it for a lot less calories than other snacks (80 calories per 3 cups hot air popped). Popcorn has fiber (most snacks don't, unless we're munching on carrot sticks), and it has virtually no fat when we pop our own in a hot air popper. And if you've been reading my tips for a while, you'll notice I'm referring to popcorn as a snack instead of a treat because of its nutritional value and low calories!What about movie popcorn or those microwave popcorns?
Okay, this is a different story! Movie popcorn is popped in either palm or coconut oil (both saturated fats), and though some theatres have changed the "type of oil" they use, the average small bag (a kiddy bag has about half) has been found to have between 400 and 600 calories with an average of 27gms to 36 gms of fat (I'm not going to horrify everyone by quoting the medium or large sizes). This does not include added butter as a topping which almost doubles the grams of fat and of course calories.
Microwave popcorn isn't much better unless we read the labels very carefully, because even most " light versions" may be heavy in fat, calories and sodium. A few brands I have found to be the best choices are, Healthy Choice, Newman's Own Light, and Orville Redenbacher's Natural Light. Check for brands that have 3 grams of fat or less per 3 cups of popped corn which is considered a standard single serving. Here's the confusing part (at least for some of us), most microwave popcorn labels give us the nutritional info based upon unpopped popcorn. The most reliable method to know how many calories we're eating (after all, ignorance is not blissful on our hips), is to calculate the total calories and fat for the whole bag/box, and then divide accordingly per the number of servings in a bag.
So, if we're shopping for football munching (Superball Sunday is Feb. 6), let's add popcorn to our list of snacks (the healthier kind,of course). If we have our own hot air popper, let's add some " I Can't Believe it's Not Butter Spray" and enjoy. If we don't have a popper, let's put it on our shopping list for the future ( try cooking.com for a hot air popper or marthastewart.com for a stove top). And of course, let's read those labels when we buy the microwave kind. By combining this lower calorie, healthy snack with those other (I know, very tasty ) snacks, we can lessen the damage a little (think trade-offs)!
June www.junefit.com
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