Flavour is the spice of life! Adding flavours to meals and learning to savour spicy, sweet and sour without adding calories will help you to make delicious meals that won’t hinder your weight management efforts.
Spicy and sour
Herbs and spices are a great way of adding flavour and interest to meals without adding many calories.
- Fresh herbs offer the purist flavours and aromas. Herbs like mint, coriander, chives and basil are easily grown in herb pots with very little space.
- Dried herbs and spices are very convenient and can be stored for long periods of time. Dried herbs have a more concentrated flavour than fresh herbs and so you use much less.
- Herb concentrates and pastes are a great way of getting the full flavour of fresh herbs in convenient long life products. Be aware that some pastes and concentrates may contain sugars.
Sweet
Sweeteners such as Equal® , Sugarine® or Splenda® are promoted as low calorie or no-calorie sweeteners ideal for anyone wanting to restrict their calorie intake. Readily available in sachets, tablets and powders these sweeteners can be used in all sorts of foods including drinks and even baked goods. These products have been around for decades, but are now more popular than ever with consumer demand for sugar-free and reduced-sugar products.
More recently, sweeteners derived from the stevia plant have started to appear on supermarket shelves. Promoted as the “natural” sugar substitute, stevia sweeteners has been gaining popularity among consumers with an appetite for natural products. Native to South America, the leaves of the stevia plant have been traditionally used as a food sweetener and to sweeten tea. As much as 300 times sweeter than sucrose (white sugar), stevia has almost zero kilojoule content and very low carbohydrate content.
There is some debate as to just how “natural” stevia products are. The stevia sweeteners you buy in the supermarket is not stevia in it’s natural form – it is a highly refined extract that can be blended with other ingredients. However, there is no debate that stevia sweeteners offer consumers a very low kilojoule sugar alternative.
