I finally tried Nutella. (official site) I did not read the label while I was still in the store. If I know I am going to buy something anyway I don’t read all that scary nutrition information. But I did read it when I got home. The stuff is 200 calories per serving!
One serving is two tablespoons. That sounds pretty generous, doesn’t it? But no, they don’t mean two serving spoons full; they mean measuring spoons. Go grab your set of measuring spoons. Look at the one marked “tablespoon”. It’s not all that big, is it? Try spreading only two times that much on an English muffin. It’s just barely enough to very thinly cover both halves – if you really work at spreading it out. Per volume most candy bars have fewer calories. And the nutrition value isn’t all that impressive. You get a trace of calcium, a trace of iron, a smidgen of fiber. That’s about it.
But it’s really gooooood! It’s chocolate; of course it’s good. It’s a dangerous thing to have in the house – chocolate that you can spread all over anything! But I’m being good. I really am. I’m trying to limit myself to the recommended two tablespoon serving (not more than once a day, and not every day) until the evil stuff is gone and then I’m not buying any more. Well… I don’t mean no more ever…
March 16th, 2011 - 8:17 am
I buy it when our oldest daughter is coming home from school. She can’t afford it, so I always have her take it home with her.
I never got into it.
March 16th, 2011 - 9:01 pm
Serving sizes for most food products are ridiculously small. There really should be some truth-in-labeling rules.
March 17th, 2011 - 7:04 am
I guess if we ate only the official serving size of everything we’d all be thin.
What gets under my skin even more are uneven numbers of servings, especially when you get something that is obviously intended to be a single serving (like a bag of peanuts) and it is labeled as 1.3 servings or 1.7 or something like that.
March 19th, 2011 - 9:31 pm
No kidding here – calorie-wise, you’re better off using Duncan Hines chocolate frosting:
http://www.duncanhines.com/products/frostings/creamy-home-style-classic-chocolate-frosting
Which, incidentally, I used to put on pancakes.
March 20th, 2011 - 6:09 pm
I wonder how it compares to peanut butter. I seem to remember reading it was calorically somewhat similar but had more sugar.
I use it on toast but I think I only use about one tablespoon to two slices of wheat toast. (The trick is to think of it similarly to butter; it has about the same number of calories).
I don’t feel bad about eating it on toast; those days I don’t get hungry before lunch and the days I eat the low-fat, low-sugar granola I have, I do.