Cut Calories: Chew Gum

Image by Lboogiepeace via Flickr

New Year's Day is fast approaching, so it is time to make those New Year's Resolutions.  For a lot of us, one of the more popular resolutions is to try to lose weight.  If you are trying to lose weight, any helpful tips are worth looking at.

A nutrition professor at the University of Rhode Island has just completed a study that suggests that chewing sugar free gum can help you reduce your calorie intake and increase your energy expenditures.  A winning combination to be sure in the battle of the bulge.

Participants in the study who chewed gum for three 20-minute sessions in the morning consumed about 67 less calories at lunch, and did not "make up" those calories later in the day.  Those same participants also expended about 5% more energy when chewing gum than when not chewing.

From personal experience, I feel like chewing gum helps me to curb my appetite somewhat.  Though, I have to admit that I do look at the results of the study with a bit of healthy skepticism.  The study was supported by a grant from the Wrigley Science Institute, part of the Wm Wrigley Gum Company.

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Rosetto Steam & Eat Cheese Ravioli

In my never ending quest to find high quality, easy to prepare frozen meals, I came across another new item for my wife and I to try.  I took a rare day off from the day job to attend a meeting at my son's school.  After the meeting my wife and I decided to stop by the grocery store to pick up something for lunch when we found Rosetto Steam and Eat Cheese Ravioli with Tomato Basil Sauce.  We have been very happy with the steam and eat vegetables we have tried, so we decided to give the ravioli a try.

The concept is pretty simple.  You put the whole bag in the microwave, nuke it for about seven minutes, and serve.  Preparation just doesn't get much easier than that.  So the easy to prepare part of my quest was met, but what about the quality?

To be honest, it was a bit of a mixed bag, no pun intended.  The flavor of the sauce was good, but there just wasn't enough of it.  The ravioli itself tasted like most store bought frozen ravioli, so it was OK.  Some of the ravioli got stuck together, and some of them were very hard.  To be honest, I don't know if that is a case of microwaving it a bit too long, or just a characteristic of the product.

We have another variety in the freezer, so we will have to give it a try before passing our final judgement on the product.  If I were to find the item on sale, I would probably buy it again if I had a hankering for ravioli and wanted it quickly instead of boiling the pasta and heating up a jar of sauce.