Hi, I'm Cissy Burrow and I'm lean Orde, and welcome to the Nutrition Couch, a biweekly podcast covering everything that is new in the world of diets and nutrition. In today's product review episodely and we are talking dips, because let's be honest, who does not like dip? And indeed, there are more and more of.
Them in the supermarket every time I go. But the truth is.
Not all dips are created equally. And today we are going to take a look at a couple of good examples of how there are some dips out there that are a whole lot healthier than others. So first of all, we will say Leanne that I am a massive fan of dips because I love a platter and I think a platter is not complete, really, is it without some beautiful,
brightly colored dips to brighten it up? And I think because they look so healthy and colorful, and they're green and red and purple, they just look like they scream with health. But that's not always the case, now, is it?
Definitely not? So we found a goody and a not so goodie for our listeners at home today, and I think a lot of people will be surprised at the not so great aversion SUSI. Because I do, I get a lot of class who say to me, oh, this is delicious. Can I have this, you know, with you know, some vegie sticks or some crackers or something like that. I'm like, yeah, sure you can have that. But you know why is that? They're like, oh, because it's really healthy.
So I think it'd be really interesting to take a look at some of the ingredient lists on ourtros and dips today.
Indeed, so the first dip that I've chosen will be familiar to a number of our listeners. It's the pill pel homis. Now.
The other thing is, everyone seems to spell homus.
Differently, but this homos has spelled hu doublenous and it is available in most rate major supermarkets. And to be honest, I came across this dip because of a client who
had said to me how good it was. And one of the key reasons that dieticians across the board love this is it's one of the very few dips that is made using extra virgin olive oil, because generally speaking, when you look at dips, the first ingredient is often vegetable oil or cream like a sort of cream cheese, and there's often very very few nutritious ingredients or low
calorie ingredients like vegetables. But in the case of the pel pail hommice, which is a beautiful creamy dip, we must say the first ingredients is the chickpeas at fifty three percent, followed by taeni which is a base of sesame and salt water. Then extra virgin olive oil, acidity regulator which is citric acid, so that's to stop it turning salt, and preservative potassium sorbait, which again is going to give it a little bit of an extra shelf life.
It does contain sesame, but is gluten free and dairy free, so appeals to people who are seeking out those requirements in their diet. Now, when we take a close look nutritionally, it's pretty strong. So the homice is in supermarket will range from I think as low as about eight percent up to about twenty five thirty percent fats. Case of this one hundred grams, it's about nineteen point seven. Now it's not a low fat food simply because homus. It does have a reasonable amount of oil in it to
give it that taste and texture. So we would never
expect it to be low in fat. It's relatively low and saturated fat though at three percent, which is good, and again that's coming from the use of the extra version olive oil eight point six grams per hundred of carbohydrate, less than one gram of sugars, a massive, well not massive, but a reasonable amount of dietary fiber again from the chickpeas at four point nine grams and sodium five hundred and four milligrams per hundred, which is pretty low in
general for a dip. And you know, the issue one of them with dips is serving sizes. You know, of course it's pretty hard to stick to a tablespoon or so, which is generally a serve because they are high fat foods. But the reason in general that we love this so much is that, as I said, it's one of the few commercial dips out there that is using not only a better type of oil, but an extra virgin olive oil, which is going is giving it a superior fatfile. So
it's one of my favorites. It's not inexpensive, it's about six dollars for the larger three hundred and fifty gram serve. It does even when it goes on sale, it's pretty pretty expensive compared to the much more process, but in this case, Lee and you really are paying for a better quality product, and I in this range itself, there's actually a couple of lower calorie vegetable options, their beetroot
almond and their spicy capsicum. I think it is a really quite low in calorie, so I regularly recommend those two. But if you're one of the many nutrition couch listeners who like us, love nothing more than homae, this is a pretty tasty one, isn't it.
Absolutely yeah, you really can't go past the better quality ingredients here. And I will make it about Homo susie because I actually ate it. I'd say probably till I was about twenty eight weeks pregnant and then realized that the newest food safety guidelines in Australia but pregnancy do not actually recommend commercial homice anymore because the tahini in it has become what are they sort of calling a food safety risk. So it's that the tahimi part of
the homas that is not recommended for pregnancy. So I didn't get to enjoy it for the last couple of months of my pregnancy. But I am happily enjoying hommas at the moment now, SUSI, But yeah, I agree this one. It's a good brand, it's got great ingredients, and it actually tastes really good as well. How much is important. It's nice and it's smooth and it's creamy.
Indeed, and as I would say, it's one of those foods that it is worth paying for better quality. Now, I think the thing with homos I will also say, is when I see those individual serves in supermarket where they sell it as a meal like a Lutch replacement. So it's quite a large pot, probably about one hundred grams of the dip or homice with rice crackers. Be very careful because those are about three four hundred calorie
meals and quite a lot of fat per serve. So I think in the case of homice, I'm using it always as a side, a bit of a seasoning, so as a spread on a sound which or putting a tablespoon or two on your snack plate and then enjoying it with vegetables because it really is easy to overeat and people call it a protein. Now I'll just go back and have another look at the protein number on it. I never would call it a protein. I call it a fat. And in the case of this variety, it's
a better fat, but it is still a fat. So Yeah, in the cerve it's up to nine point seven per hundred grams, but we would suggest twenty to forty. You're getting about four grams of protein. So it's certainly not a high protein food. It's definitely got more protein than some other dips, but it is not a high protein food and it shouldn't be thought of as that it's a high fat food.
It needs to be consumed in moderation.
As such, because I think we're sometimes led to believe that the legume base makes it a protein and so we can consume it in large amounts. But one of the things about homess is that it's made with oil to give it that flavor and taste and texture, so.
It's really easy to overeat.
And it's high fat, and in the case of this it's a better type of fat. And as we've mentioned before, you can eat too much fat, so do absolutely wash your portions because as delicious as it is, it is easy to over consume.
Yeah, so it has protein in it, but we wouldn't necessarily say it's a wonderful source of protein.
Put it that way.
Potentially, if you're you know, you're following completely vegan or plant based lifestyle, it probably is a It gives you a good amount of protein, but it also gives you
a decent whack of fat, as Susie mentioned. But I think the portion size is this key because if you look at the nutritional panel on this brand, even though how good it is, there's seventeen point five servings per packet Susie and I don't know anybody that would take seventeen and a half servings to eat that small tuble of hommas, like nobody ever, I haven't quite a few clients su before working with me. They would happily have a couple of rows of rice crackers and an entire
thing of homas for lunch. We could easily be in excess of like seven eight hundred calories, just because I think we have this health halo perception that all homice is healthy and rice crackers are healthy when they're low calorie. But when you're eating a few rows of rice crackers and a whole tup of homas, you're not necessarily doing yourself the best thing from a fat loss perspective.
We've all been there. I'm laughing because we've all been there so absolutely. And the other trick actually I've learnt on platters now is rather than put the entire container of dip out, I spoon some of it out into an individual serving dish and just put that out. Because what we know about food behaviors is that we all will eat the foods that are served to us.
So if you put the.
Entire container of hommice out, you will eat the whole lot, Whereas if you spoot it out, I might get two or three different serves of entertaining out of that homics. So it's more cost effective as well, because it isn't inexpensive, and it just means it regulates everyone a little bit better. So that's another trick. If you love your dip, make it go a little bit further and put it into smaller containers to dip with, and it will be much better nutritionally and from a budget perspective.
Let me do one last tip, Susie, making your homics go a little bit further. I sometimes use if I've got just a little bit of homus left in the container. I make a salad dressing out of it. So I take the little bit of hommics, dilute it up with some water and squeeze some lemon juice and a little bit of pepper and make a really sort of nice salad dressing out of it as well. So you can make quite a love that little bit.
Further, I do love that.
I love that, and it's really smart too, because we do know that we waste a lot of food, and if you've got a little bit of dip at the bottom, that's a very smart way, particularly when it's good quality stuff like the pillpl that we're investing in. But now we're going to talk about another one, because as I said, there's a lot of dips out there, and this brand
that we've chosen is not specifically bad at itself. It's just an example of where you can be a little bit misled when it comes to actually what's in your dip. So this is the Black Swan avocado and on the beautiful green label. What screams out to me is that it's so fresh, it's green, it looks very very healthy. But when I take a closer look at the ingredient, lesslie. And the first thing is cream cheese, which is milk, cream, salt,
and stabilizers. So high fat ingredient avocado pulp is seven percent of the overall ingredients, which means that that's the next greatest percentage product. So we're probably looking at something like ninety two percent of cream cheese and a very small amount of avocado to give it that color and to be able to claim that it's avocado really should be avocado based.
Dip or cream cheese with a touch of avocado.
I like that, cream cheese with a touch of avocado. Thicknut vegetable oil, potato which will be being used to thiket it. A little bit lemon juice to stop it from going brown, some spring onion and garlic, ure salt spice the city regulator's color, so they are also coloring it up water preservatives. Now, the reason I'm reading you that is not to say, oh my goodness, look how many preservatives and additudes are in this dip. Because it
is a process food, you will have that. Admittedly, the ingredient list is quite long compared to the previous dip, which was pretty clean. But most importantly I'm just pointing out that the most powerful ingredient on that list is cream cheese, which is a high saturated fat product. So if we look at the nutritionals of this per hundred grams, it's almost thirty percent fat and almost over fifteen percent
saturated fat. So it's got five times the amount of saturated fat is the previous hummus we've looked at, and so it's not only much higher in fat, but it's much higher in the worst type of fat. It does have added sugars, So this would be a food I would never recommend or suggest people have. If people want to ad avocado dipley and I would say, get your avocado, mash it up, add a little bit of chili and lemon tree, then.
You're good to go.
So it does really pay to have a quick look at the ingredient list of dips and see actually what you're actually getting. If you want a vegetable based dip, like a beetroot dip, like a capsicn dip, you want that to be the first ingredient on that label. I think one of my favorite Egyptian beetroot dips is like ninety percent or more beetroot and that fat, you know, high saturated fat food. And it's really easy to overeat because, as we've spoken about dips, you don't just have a tablespoon.
You're going through the whole amount, so be careful.
Most I would say, out of say the top fifty dips in supermarket, forty five of them are made of a vegetable oil or cream cheese based, and then there's a small handful of ones that have a vegetable base or it is a better quality product like the homus we've spoken about, and that's why it's, you know, a quick and easy filler for supermarkets.
They're relatively cheap.
They're often on sale for three dollars for the big tub, but often, as I said, you're just paying for process vegetable oil, and I wouldn't ever spend money on that.
And this was still because it is predominantly cream cheese. You're just eating cream cheese. And I laugh at the per serving because if you look at the perserving, it actually doesn't look too bad from an energy and a calorie perspective because the serving size is ten gram Susie like, that's miniscule. It's like what the tea spoon and a half.
Nobody's going to eat that it's crazy, and the fact that they add color in there to add more greenness to it to make it look more avocado like, but the reality is that there's only seven percent avocado in this dip. So if you guys actually like a good quality avocado dip, and sometimes you're a bit lazy like myself,
you bit time poor. My favorite recommendation from an avocado dip perspective is the Abella brand Susie that's like ninety five percent avocado and it's just got a little bit of lemon and a little bit of garlic in it, So that one's probably the only one that I would actually call an avocado dip. The rest of the avocado dips on the market are basically cream cheese with a touch of avocado in them.
Unfortunately, and really, let's be honest, cream cheese is misleading in itself. There's not much that's cheesy in cream cheese. Cream cheese is a massive cream like yeah, exactly, So also keep that in mind. I often have clients ask me about cream cheese as an alternative to chetta cheese, and I'll say, really, it's not nutritionally like a cheese at all. It's acting as a fat so we do need to watch it. And it's thick and gluggy. You can't get a small portion of it, and that's one
of the issues. It's really really easy to over eat large volumes of saturated fat when that is one of the key ingredients that are going in.
All right, well, leanne.
That brings us to the end of another Nutrition Couch product wrap up for this week. I mean, if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to have us delivered to your inbox every Sunday and Wednesday morning. We have our Instagram and Facebook sites running if you've got any ideas for product reviews, and we will see you for our next product review next Wednesday morning.
Catch you guys next week.