Diet Recipes Can Harm Your Diet

I recently read “The Ultimate Low Fat Baking Cookbook.” This is a huge, glossy-photo coffee table books, so I start flipping through and first thing I noticed the photos. They were taken close up to make it appear the cakes and slices of pie were normal sized, but if you looked closer you could see that was not the case. These were Barbie doll sized portions! Every cake recipe made the equivalent of a one-layer round yet served eight. You do the math. Divide it in half, then again into quarters, and finally into eighths and you’ve got some dinky portions. So, naturally the calorie count, fat content, carb content, and the sodium are low, but that’s not a diet recipe.

That’s why I’ve usually shunned these cookbooks. Yes, they do make some substitutions to bring down the overall fat content in the recipe, but let’s be realistic. When’s the last time you made a batch of cookies that served 18?

Another cookbook is called Six Ingredients or Less, but I laughed myself silly when I saw the recipes. For example: Strawberry Pie. Take 1 9-inch baked pie shell, 1 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, 3 tablespoons strawberry Jello powder, and 3 cups fresh whole strawberries. Says it serves 8. Yeah, right. Three cups of berries? Serves 8? Let’s see, each person gets, about 1/3 cup of strawberries (about four big berries), a smear of Jello and a crusty bit? Pleeze. No topping either. ;-(

This recipe claims a calorie count of 284 per serving, so times 8 that little bit-o-pie costs 2,272 calories! Seems it might have made more sense to just eat a bowlful of berries, as a whole cup of raw berries has only 46 calories, even adding some whipped cream sweetened with Splenda wouldn’t add many calories.

Here’s another: Ground Turkey Sandwich touted as “great for kids.” It calls for 3/4 pound ground lean turkey, 1 cup finely chopped onion, 1 1/2 cups of catsup (vegetable?), 2 tablespoons white vinegar, 2 teaspoons sugar (why sugar, the catsup has enough), and 2 teaspoons dry mustard. So not counting the spices and flavorings this recipe has 3/4 pound ground turkey, 1 cup chopped onions and 1.5 cups of catsup and it serves six! Yikes. That’s 1/8th of a pound of meat, 1/16th cup of onions and a ton of catsup per person, or child as the case may be. Wouldn’t want those little tykes to get too full, would we? No wonder they fill up on chips.

Too many times these recipes trick people into thinking their eating low calorie when they are not, simply because they didn’t notice the recipe should serve 8 and instead are splitting it with their husband. Oops.