Diet Food Reviews

Ostrim Natural Meat Sticks

By: Ellen | Mar 10, 2010

I was wandering around looking for a snack today when I decided to duck into The Vitamin Shoppe, where I have been known to buy things like Glenny's Organic 100 Calorie Brownies. There, I spotted something I've heard about and seen a lot, yet never had a chance to try: Ostrim Meat Sticks. This "96% fat-free high protein snack made from beef & ostrich" looked like it was right up my beef jerky-loving alley. I decided I would start with the Natural version, as opposed to Teriyaki or Pepper, and plunked down my $1.89.

This snack stick is pretty big - one (single-serving) piece weighs in at 42 grams and is a hearty size. With that large size, one would expect some proportionally large amount of calories, but each stick provides just 80 calories and 14 grams of protein. It's also low in fat (2% & 3% of the daily value for total and saturated fat), 17% of the DV for sodium (a little high), only 2 grams of carbohydrates and 10% of the RDA for iron. A stick also has 590 mg of potassium, which is 17% of DV. While most foods have potassium (it's in cells, and pretty much everything we eat is made up of cells), 17% strikes me as an impressively high number.

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More Reviews on Ostrim

• Oh Boy Oberto Fat Free Teriyaki Beef Jerky
• Planters Trail Mix Golden Nut Crunch
• Pepperidge Farm Pumpernickel Snack Sticks

Although this is called Ostrim, beef is the first ingredient. The others are ostrich, filtered water, nonfat dry milk, and 2% or less of citric acid, salt, potassium chloride, mustard flour, potassium lactate, black pepper, garlic powder, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, and sucralose. That's a long ingredient list, but this is a preserved meat after all.

As for taste, I liked this. It was nicely salty and spicy, and the texture was chewy (and a bit slippery, like all meat sticks). It was a satisfying size, perfect for a mid-day snack and a cure for a salt craving. Ostrich is supposed to be leaner than beef, and I liked the combo of low-cal and high-protein - it's half as much calories as Oh Boy Oberto Fat Free Beef Jerky, for example, which has 80 calories per 28 gram stick. I'll probably buy this again for a quick protein fix and probably instead of some snack bars.

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