Continuing on in our fast-food series, here’s fast-food number 3. No, we’re not talking about MacDonald’s or BK, there’s a different meaning here. For a food to be fast it must contain bags of carbohydrate with as little fat as possible. A moderate amount of protein wouldn’t go amiss either (this tends to happen as a matter of course), but basically the higher the carbs and lower the fat the better.
Pretzels
Nutritional Info (per 100g):
Energy 400 kcal
Protein 9.4g
Carbohydrate 88.8g
Fat 0.8g
% Calories from Carbohydrate: 88.8%
% Calories from Protein: 9.4%
% Calories from Fat: 1.8%
(the claimed energy figure for this product is 391kcal, but I have quoted the calculated energy figure based on carbohydrate, protein and fat weight – this means that the % values all add up to 100)
Ingredients:
Unbleached White Flour, Water, Soya Oil, Barley Malt, Yeast, Salt.
Taste Verdict: They’re bland, so hardly a gormet meal, but they’re a viable healthy alternative to ready salted crisps if you fancy a snack. They are absolutely packed with carbohydrate and contain negligable fat, so you can see how munching on these as an accompaniment to your sandwiches will help you to recover from the rigours of hard training. The only negative could be the salt content and they’ve conveniently left the sodium stats off the packaging. On saying that however, if you’re an active person and you treat these things as an alternative to crisps, sodium shouldn’t be too much of an issue. In fact, they’d be a good warm weather snack combined with plenty of water. Finally on the subject of water and separate from sodium, remember to drink plenty of fluid with this dry snack or you won’t store the carbohydrate effectively. You need about 3 grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate and these pretzels contain no water.
If you reckon you’ve got a fast-food and you’d like to share it with us, please send an e-mail to fastfood@torqfitness.co.uk giving the full nutritional information of the product and your taste verdict on a scale of 1-10 (1=orrible 10=Mmmmyummy). If you can take a photo of it too, that would be fab.
