As a kid my favorite cookies were Nabisco Oreos. These delicious little gems were the best. You could take them apart and eat the fluffy filling and then finish off with cookie outsides. Dipped in milk these were like Manna from Heaven. Since they were expensive we didn’t get them very often, but when we did they were a wonderful treat.
With the passing of the years and the slowing of my metabolism, these have been off limits for years. I still love them, but my willpower to pass them up is not great. At 55 calories per cookie, you can really damage your diet quickly with these little pucks of joy.
The other day I was walking through the lunch room at work and noticed out of the corner of my eye a bag of Oreos in the snack machine. But this wasn’t any ordinary bag, it had a description that I had never seen before on any cookie bag.
It said 100 Calorie Pack.
What? That must mean you get 2 cookies! But I looked closer and had to buy a bag just to check it out. I put 2 quarters in the machine and I soon had a bag of Oreo’s in my hand. I quickly opened them with a sense of excitement. I could now have a bag of my favorite cookies without killing my diet.
Just then the excitement died… the new cookies had no filling! How could this be? An Oreo is not an Oreo without the filling. I took a close look at one of the new cookies. It was a flat dry cookie with some little white sprinkles on it. This could hardly be called an Oreo.
I tasted one and it was like eating a dry version of just the Oreo cookie. It was OK… but certainly not a real Oreo. I noticed in the same machine that there were 100 calorie packs of other popular snacks.
I thought to myself… This is marketing brilliance!
100 Calories is pure genius!
The cookie companies can now sell smaller portions and make people happy at the same time. 100 calories will fit on almost any diet plan. Compared to the regular cookies in the machine at 360 calories, this was a dieter’s Nirvana.
When I looked at the ingredients, it was the usual processed stuff, with sugar, flour and corn syrup. Nothing to recommend here. But if you don’t have a healthy snack like an apple or orange with you, these new snacks might be an acceptable alternative to satisfy your sweet tooth without killing your diet.
