5 Super Bowl Snacks I Won't Be Eating

1. Cookie Dough Dip

2. Velveeta Fudge Squares

3. Jack-In-The-Box's Bacon Milkshake (especially given that there's actually no bacon in it)

4. Buffalo Wing Cupcakes with Blue Cheese Frosting

5. Domino’s Three Cheese Mac-n-Cheese Pasta Bowl

UPDATED: Okay -- one more: Buffalo Wing Soda

"Fudge Tracks" Are Not Health Food

Last year, Fitness Magazine compiled a list of the "healthiest" foods you can buy at your supermarket -- remember?



Well, stop the presses! Last month, Fitness Magazine unveiled the winners of its “Healthy Food Awards” for 2011!

According to the magazine, these foods are “[t]he best of the best! The complete collection of our annual picks for the most delicious health foods on the planet”! Did you hear that? THE! MOST! DELICIOUS! HEALTH! FOODS! ON! THE! PLANET!

And how did they pick the winners? Fitness Magazine shares its methodology:

We worked with top nutritionists to find hundreds of sweet, salty, and savory treats that are low in calories and fat. Then we crunched our way through them to bring you the best-tasting options to satisfy any craving -- and still keep you slim.

Oooh! "Top nutritionists"! "Low in calories and fat!" "Crunching!" Scientific!

So without further ado, here are a few of the items selected by Fitness Magazine as the “healthiest” foods available to us:

• Funley’s Original Stix in the Mud Chocolate Cookie Clusters (because they’re “individually wrapped for easy portion control”!)
• Kozy Shack Chocolate Pudding (it’s “made with low-fat milk”!)
• Skinny Cow Low-Fat Fudge Bars ("guilt-free" because, well, see above!)
• Frito-Lay's Rold Gold Pretzels (as one Fitness Magazine editor says, “the salt helps keep me going!” -- and we all know that salt is the human body’s primary energy source!)
• Deep Chocolate VitaMuffins (hey -- it says “Vita” so it’s gotta be healthy!)
• Coca-Cola's Vitaminwater Zero Rhythm (yes, the name "Zero Rhythm" is unfortunate -- but it's engineered to have zero calories!)
• Edy's Slow Churned Fudge Tracks Ice Cream (really? "Fudge Tracks”?)

Thank you, Fitness Magazine! Thanks for showing us that food quality doesn’t matter, and that we can freely eat highly-processed, sugary, lab-engineered foods -- so long as they’re low-fat, shrink-wrapped in 100-calorie packs and (most importantly) chocolatey. Who needs real food anyway? I mean, "our intellectual development has brought us a greater scientific understanding of the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy," right? And what our bodies need is more chocolate cookie clusters, dammit!

Frankly, it’s a relief to see that grass-fed, pastured meat and sustainably-grown vegetables aren’t anywhere on the magazine’s list of “healthiest” foods. Otherwise, I would’ve suspected that Fitness Magazine’s editors had caved to the influence of the nation's evil, super-powerful lobby of small, local farmers and ranchers.

Seriously, Fitness Magazine: It's not that hard.

Broccoli & Cheetos

Almost Paleo. Almost. (The broccoli part, anyway.)



Recipe here. But please don't try this at home.

[Thanks, @lawyerhands!]

PepsiCo's Drinkifying Your Snack

It may surprise you to learn that PepsiCo, the largest food-and-beverage company in the U.S., doesn’t just make cola. Eighteen of its brands, including Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses. And collectively, these brands are responsible for many of the ultra-processed, insanely-sugary snack foods that are killing us. Plainly put, PepsiCo is making people fat and sick.

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But according to this week's New Yorker, PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, wants the company to help battle the obesity epidemic, and to “lead the fight in the public health realm.” How? By selling "healthy," “scientifically advantaged” snacks that are “good for you."

“It’s not a question of selling less,” Nooyi has said. “It’s a question of selling the right stuff.”

Wow! Does this mean PepsiCo’s going to stop selling, say, PEPSI? Or TOSTITOS? Or AUNT JEMIMA SYRUP (which lists corn syrup AND high fructose corn syrup as its two primary ingredients)?

More after the jump...

Check It Out: Tanka Bars

If a snack somes in a shiny, colorful wrapper -- Fritos! Little Debbies! Pop Tarts! -- it's probably not good for you. But face it: We occasionally need a shelf-stable snack to throw into our bags. Backpackers and bodybuilders aren't the only ones who need a protein bar every now and then. Sometimes, when a work meeting drifts past noon and the office orders in mayo-drenched sandwiches, corn chips and chocolate chip cookies, we need to pull out an emergency snack from the dark, linty recesses of our bags. And that nasty Ziplock filled with stale almonds and rancid jerky won't do.

Snack bars seem like a good idea. But which one do you choose? These days, supermarket shelves are crammed with a dizzying number of different protein and/or meal replacement bars. Examples include:

• Clif Bars and PowerBars (for carb-fueled energy!) 
• Pure Protein Bars and Met-RX Protein Plus Bars (for aspiring he-men!) 
• thinkThin and Full Bars (for those looking to starve themselves thin!)
• Raw Revolution Bars and Pro Bars (for raw food vegan hippies!)
• KIND BARs and LARABARs (for Whole Foods shoppers who love ALL CAPS!)

It's overwhelming -- another example of the paradox of choice. As a result, most shoppers are left baffled, and will probably stick to what's familiar -- even if it tastes horrible and isn't particularly good for them.

Thankfully, for us Paleo eaters, the pickings are actually kind of slim. (Don't be fooled into thinking, for example, that "PaleoBars" are actually Paleo at all. The ingredients include grains, dairy, and a whole lot of laboratory-generated stuff I can't pronounce.)

One of the very few decent choices: LARABARs. They're Paleo/Primal-friendly. The non-chocolate flavors are free of soy, dairy and added sugar, and none of 'em contain gluten. They're made with just a handful of whole food ingredients -- mostly fruit and nuts.

We have some LARABARs in our pantry, and I'm not averse to breaking one out every once in a blue moon.

Still, I'm not crazy about the amount of sugar in LARABARs. Most flavors contain 18 to 24 grams of sugar -- mostly, I would guess, from the fruit. The primary ingredient of most LARABAR varieties is one or more high glycemic fruits like dates or bananas -- and since I don't tend to eat a lot of sugary fruits these days, I'm also not making a habit of chowing down on LARABARs.

So what's at the bottom of my briefcase?

Answer: Tanka Bars.

Tanka Bars are gluten- and hormone-free meat snacks made by a company started by Lakota Indians on their reservation in South Dakota. The Bars are a modern take on traditional wasna or pemmican, but leaner. (Bison is grassfed and naturally lean, and unlike pemmican, Tanka Bars don't appear to incorporate a lot of fat.) 


The ingredients? Buffalo, dried cranberries, sea salt, red pepper, onion, garlic, and lactic acid starter culture. There's some added sugar in the dried cranberries, but I'm not too concerned; it's a small amount, and (as with lots of cured meat products) the lactic acid starter culture eats it. As a point of comparison, a Tanka Bar contains 6 grams of sugar -- one-third or one-fourth the amount found in a LARABAR -- which itself isn't exactly high-carb.

I've tried the original Tanka Bar as well as the "Spicy Pepper Blend" version. The latter is my favorite of the two (though I wish was even spicier), but both are pretty damned good. like a moist, slightly-sweet, less-chewy version of buffalo jerky. I've also bought a bunch of bags of Tanka Bites -- which I think are essentially cut-up pieces of Tanka Bars. They're a great choice, too, because sometimes, just one bar isn't enough.

And don't tell me this video doesn't give you the warm and fuzzies about Native American Natural Foods, the makers of Tanka Bars:

I'm not the only fan of Tanka Bars; the Denver Post recently published a short but glowing review, and Mark Sisson has recommended 'em, too.

Don't kick yourself if you haven't noticed Tanka Bars at your corner store -- they aren't (yet?) available at most supermarkets. Currently, the best place to find 'em are at REI stores, natural/health food stores (I ain't talking about GNC or Vitamin Shoppe, people), and on Tanka's online store. (And for those of you Luddites who refuse to buy stuff online, Tanka's website has a handy store locator, too.)

Also: Until December 31, you can use the online coupon code TANKAHOLIDAYS to get 15% off all the regularly-priced stuff on Tanka's website. So check 'em out.