As I have mentioned before, I am registered with SparkPeople.com, a free weightloss and health Web site. One of the great things about SP is that you can sign up for all of these great emails – Fitness Tip of the Day, Nutrition News, etc. Perhaps my favorite is the SparkPeople Food Showdown. In the email they take two popular foods and get you to try and guess which one is better for you. It can be anything from two popular granola bars to restaurant burgers or candy bars. What ever the food, I am always surprised by the results. Take the Showdown below, I never would have guessed the results to be what they are.

Which movie candy is lower in calories?
Candy goes with movies just as much as popcorn does. Here are two popular
movie-going snacks–both are fruity and chewy. Candies like this tend to be low
in fat, which is a good thing. But, if you ate the whole package or box
yourself, which of these fruit-flavored favorites would do the least caloric
damage?

The winner…. Mike & Ike

Twizzlers vs. Mike & Ike
A theater sized box of Mike & Ike candies is about 3 ounces, and contains 320 calories and zero grams of fat. Obviously, this is a much better choice that that theater popcorn, which commands over 1,000 calories in a bag. The Twizzlers package is larger (6 ounces) so you’re getting more food and consuming more calories (about 570), but this treat is still low in fat (3.8 grams for the entire bag). However, per ounce, Twizzlers is the winner. If you evenly split this bag with your movie date, you’d consume about 280 calories and 3 ounces of licorice bliss.

Conversation With My 4 1/2 Year Old

Me: “SM. What would you like to drink with dinner? You can have a glass of milk, apple juice, or pink lemonade.”

SM: “Ummmmm. Juice.”

Me: “Ok.”

As I pull the juice from the fridge I hear the following:

SM: “Mom, it’s Juicy Juice?”

Me: “Yes. Grandma bought it.”

SM: “Yum. Its the very best juice for the very best kids.”

Me: “What??”

SM: “Like on TV mom.”

I hate TV.

Just came across a fun posting on the Neatorama blog. They’ve posted about some of the top fads of our time. Definitely worth checking out. I got quite the chuckle out of it. Here are some of my favorites:

Neon Hypercolor Shirts – Hypercolor [wiki] blinded America with science in 1991. Using a revolutionary dye process, the shirts overlaid a traditional neon dye with a special dye that became colorless when hot, exposing patches of bright color beneath. But Hypercolor often stopped working after a couple of washes, which helps explain why the company that owned it was bankrupt by 1993.

Pac-Man – Birth of the Fad: 1980; Death of the Fad: 1981, when Atari released a home version of the popular arcade game that was so bad, it’s still frequently blamed for the video-game-business crash of 1983.

Superball - Already on top of its game after introducing the Frisbee® (then known as the Pluto Platter) in 1957, the Wham-O® Company staged another toy-industry coup in 1965 when it introduced the Superball. In only six months, the company sold close to 7 million of the high-bounce balls.