Amidst all of the talk about Nutrition Month in Canada, I found myself discussing, of all things, Tim Hortons donuts.

I’d called a friend while he happened to be queued up at Tim’s to grab a coffee and a snack. We joked about which donut could possibly be the least dreadful for his health.

Since donuts don’t come with nutritional labels, a consumer has to seek out the sweet treat’s sugar-fat-cal stats. My friend is trim and fit, but he tries not to overdo it on sugar, since type 2 diabetes runs in his family, so we wondered which variety might have fewer grams of sugar.

I bet him it was the old fashioned plain and became curious if I was right. So, I decided to look up a few donut detals, first here and then here. I was most surprised by what I learned about that tinier treat - the Timbit! [Read more →]

You don’t have to go trick-or-treating to be haunted by Halloween candy. Bite-sized chocolate bars and chewy sweet treats tempt us from overflowing bowls in offices, lobbies, and front halls every year.

You see those tiny packages and shrug, “Oh well, one won’t hurt me.” But then one can quickly turn to three, especially if the candy sits in the office kitchen or on the table near your front door.

If you’re like many people this year - trying to stretch your dollar a bit farther - you’ll buy big bulk bags of candies to hand out to the parade of trick-or-treating tots who ring your doorbell. Though the mega-bag may list the nutritional info of each type of candy inside, those teensy individual portions do not.

Here’s the bittersweet nutritional rundown of some of our bite-sized favourites: [Read more →]

Those who know the song “A Taste of Honey” will surely remember the line “taste much sweeter than wine.” There’s also even a song called “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.”

If you’re the average Canadian wine drinker, putting back a few glasses of some dry red or semi-dry white, it may occur to you that it’s not really all that hard to be sweeter than wine. Myself, I favour Bordeaux (and its Ontario emulations, often called “meritage”), South African Shiraz, Ripasso, and similar dry reds. Just about anything has more sugar than they do. A glass has about 3 grams of carbohydrates in total, of which about 0.75 grams is sugars.

But I guess enough people are concerned about the sugar in their wine to justify production of a sugar-free wine sweetened with a sugar alternative. Such as the one that will be found in the gift bags at this year’s Oscars. [Read more →]