Atkins Endulge Chocolate Mint Covered Cookies

By: Tanya Taylor, PhD | May 6, 2005

If you are a long time reader of this review website, you will know that I love snacks. I tend to crave salty more than sweet, but I didn't want to leave you chocolate lovers out and what sounds better than chocolate covered mint cookies. The Atkins diet is synonymous with low carbs. In the nutrition world, it's also synonymous with high fat. With this in mind, I examined the nutrition label before taking a bite since I wanted to know what I was getting myself into.

Each serving is 2 cookies from which you get 120 calories which is not bad, but there are 8 g of fat, 5 grams of which is saturated fat (25% of daily recommendations). The 5 g saturated fat is listed on the label as 1% of the daily value, but it should be 25% since the recommended daily value is 20 g (or less). I emailed the company asking about this (** no response 6 months later **). The saturated fat comes from their use of palm oil and palm kernel oil (the 2nd and 3rd most abundant ingredients in this product). There are three types of vegetable oils with high amounts of saturated fats, coconut oil (86%), palm kernel oil (81%), and palm oil (49%). Why on earth would Atkins choose to use 2 of the 3 that aren't necessarily good for people when there are tons more vegetable oils out there?

These cookies are also sugar free because they use 8 g of sugar alcohols and sucralose (more known these days as Splenda). Sugar alcohols are known (scientifically proven) to cause stomach upset - cramps, flatulence, and diarrhea for example. So let me warn you, I had two cookies and yes! I did experience some of those tummy issues (not diarrhea), but imagine if you have too many of these cookies what would happen ...

These chocolate mint covered cookies are much less sweet and chocolatey than the real thing, but still good. The chocolate covering was really thin, and the cookies were very crunchy. They were more like close cousins to real chocolate covered mint cookies. I'm not sure if they will be a good chocolate substitute for 'true choco-holics' since I'm not one, but they were not bad at all. Price was $2.50 for about 8 cookies.

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