With all the low-fat, heart-healthy, no trans-fat labels on snacks, it's hard to tell the true healthy snacks from the healthy label hype. What is a healthy snack anyway? We asked nutritionist Sophie Pachella to come up with a list of criteria for you snackers out there to evaluate whether your food choice is diet-friendly or not. From now on, we'll be adopting these criteria to bring you the best in diet-friendly snacking. If a snack meets three out of the five rules, it's CYC-worthy.
1. 200 kcal Sophie says she'd never recommend snacking on less than 200 cals — that's a minimum. "Anything less sparks your metabolism, gets you going, but leaves you hungry."
2. Less than 25g carbohydrates
3. At least 3g fiber
4. At least 7 grams protein
5. Less than 1g saturated fat
One non-negotiable is trans fats. "People should check labels because if it has less than 0.5 gram trans fat the company can round to zero, but eat 4 servings of .5 grams and you get 2. 2 which is really the upper limit for a whole day," Pachella says. Look for "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" in the label to find trans fats.
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