Day 14 - OREO is a Four Letter Word - Beating the Environment with HMR
Posted by Alicia Leeds on Thu, Apr 23, 2009 @ 03:07 PM
Having a variety of edible snacks increases the chances of eating more of them. The Oreo guys at Nabisco are banking on it. Every time I am in the grocery store there is a new variety of Oreo cookies on the end cap. End caps are prime grocery real estate, especially now that a lot of us have gotten hip to shopping the perimeter, so even with the best avoidance strategies, Oreos pop.
I haven't actually eaten an Oreo since - oh - college maybe - when I used to devour a row of double stuff at a sitting. (You have to finish the row...!) But still, Oreos have made their way into my consciousness by their sheer persistance and variety, and today, to prove the point that variety is key to longevity with any edible choice, I visited www.NabiscoWorld.com/oreo (for real) to find out exactly how many different kinds of Oreo cookies there are.
Turns out there are 48 different Oreo products to choose from on the website. (I know there are even more because the Oreo straws weren't on there.) 48! Some were same cookies, different package, but even accounting for that, there were still 30 DIFFERENT kinds of Oreos to choose from.
There are the standard Oreo and the golden, plus both of those double stuffed. For a little color you can choose purple, orange or red middles - or a nice chocolate fudge. There are Oreos for Halloween and Easter as well as Holiday Oreos (I assume those cover Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice and...New Years?) With a nod to health conscious consumers there are reduced fat Oreos and Oreos made with organic sugar. You can have your Oreos mini and in snack packs and in 100 calorie packs and to go. You can have them white fudge covered or chocolate covered with or without mint. And finally, you can have your Oreos turned into a cake or a pie crust, or put your Oreo ice cream in your Oreo ice cream cone.
From the Oreo page you can click on Oreo Moments and share your special Oreo experiences with others. Photos of the Eiffel Tower and The Great Wall of China pop up, suggesting that perhaps our experience of the world's great attractions would be enhanced if only we brought our cookies along.
What was not on the website, however, was the simple calorie information I am looking for. There are nutrition facts, with calories listed for grams of Oreo cookie products - but they don't tell you haw many grams there are in a single Oreo cookie. I finally had to settle on the single serving snack pack label which listed calories at 250, fat calories 100. Phew.
By now I am going pretty crazy in Oreo, NabiscoWorld, and that's when I check out the Consumer Alert. "WARNING!! Eating Oreos is hazardous to your health!!" Of course not.
In fact the Consumer Alert simply assures us of Oreo's quality, no salmonella tainted ingredients are used in Oreo Production. Well, Thank Goodness!
With so many Oreos to choose from how could I choose just one? I could, theoretically have a unique and memorable Oreo moment to share with a different Oreo every day of the month!
I pick on Oreos only partly in jest. We live in an impossible food environment, an environment designed for weight gain, created by a food industry (and I use the term food loosely) that churns out one sticky sweet gooey crunchy salty high fat processed product after another.
Managing your weight and health in this environment is more difficult than ever. (But there are fuji and gala and macintosh and pink lady and red delicious and green and cortland apples to choose from!) Keep trying. Keep working on new strategies, new recipes, new ideas, focus on building a variety of things to choose from. The more variety you have with your healthy choices, the more likely you will be to keep practicing them.
Check out our recipe pages for new ideas. Make sure to add extracts, flavorings, spices and veggies and fruits to your HMR meal replacements.Try new healthy foods every day. The Oreo guys are hard at work - so we have to work harder!