My Low Sugar Snacks Journey p1

I consider myself to be a Serious Snacker. As in I am serious about my snacks and my snack food. I keep up on all the latest releases and I make sure I have an even balance of chewy and crunchy and chocolatey and refreshing and bubbly available. I obsessively stalk post-holiday discount candy. I tried to write for the impulsive buy. I used to have in my tinder profile “tell me about your fav items from trader joes” and it was very effective. It’s just not something I’m normal about.

So it’s been really depressing for me the last few months that due to some health issues that left me suffering from debilitating migraines for six weeks and ruined my New York trip and made me cancel my LA trip thanks January 2025, I’ve had to seriously adjust my diet and that includes limiting sugar intake. Me, an obsessive about pastry, ice cream aficionado candy fiend. It SUCKS. I’ve cried in the grocery store (tho not in H-Mart actually).

I’ve gotten very into apples and peanut butter. And bagged caesar salads. Low carb tortillas with turkey or salmon burger, giardenara and cheese. Low carb tortilla with refried beans from the mexican grocery store, fluffy soft scrambled eggs and cheese. Baby carrots and hummus (but omg trader joes changed their mediterannean hummus and fucked with the tahini ratio thus ruining one of the only decent grocery store hummuses). Sinigang na baka with daikon and kale, no kanin. And that’s basically my meals. I keep meaning to get into Sweet Greens style grain bowls by prepping like quinoa and roasted sweet potato and chick peas and chicken or something but I keep getting stuck at making the quinoa 🤷🏻‍♀️.

But it’s fine really, that’s plenty of food options. I used to live on oatmeal squares (RIP to my favourite cereal), green juice and lean meat with zucchini and fried almonds. And my snacks. MY SNACKS 😭😭😭

So once I started feeling better (which let me tell you, it took two months for the insurance to approve my prescription. Good thing my doctor had samples) I started exploring the world of low/no sugar and let me tell you, things have come a long way from just Smart Sweets.

So allow me to present some of my findings. Because something good has to come from this and if that’s me writing again then so be it.

Sorry if you like Smart Sweets, I’ve thought they were trash since before the haribo no sugar gummies drama. I tried the red licorice option recently just to see if they’d improved and the answer was no.

I do enjoy all these options tho! Most of them after the package has been sitting open for a few days and they harden up a bit because they’re very soft. Except the Albanese No Sugars which are perfect in every way and also the cheapest option being $2.70 at Walmart vs the $3-4/bag for all the rest. The Behaves are more like jellies than gummies. The Alanis I’m annoyed I like because I find their marketing obnoxious. I side-by-side compared the lilys and the lower sugar albanese and I’ve completely forgotten what I liked about which so I guess I’ll just have to redo the tasting for tiktok.

Sugar alcohols lend themselves well to fruit flavours and popsicle texture isn’t really dependent on sugar in the same way ice cream is so these are all bangers. Unfortunately sugar alcohols do not work as well for caramel or chocolate so they need so much more of them. I’ll do the werthers sugar free hard caramels but chocolates is just a hard no. Instead I limit to 7g sugar/serving and try really really hard to just have one serving.

Now there are plenty of dark chocolates that fit the bill (my fav is the trader joes pound plus 72% dark chocolate. I like a thicc bar to bite down into) but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that New Zealand Kit Kats do too! They’re at World Market and they’re pretty spendy at $7/bar but it’s 10 servings and something other than just dark chocolate. The Gold Crush is my favourite.

I was going to get into my plantain chip explorations but I’m flagging so maybe we leave this at sweets. I’ve just started branching into lower sugar ice creams and yogurts so expect a followup post soon.