Healthy National Junk Food Day?

July 21st will be National Junk Food Day but as someone who has been losing weight, and doing pretty well at that, and who wants to keep it off, how could I celebrate it with chocolate but in a healthier fashion?  During the winter of this year I got a sample from Brookside Chocolate of their new Dark Chocolate Crunch Clusters Berry Medley Flavors through CrowdTap where I've gotten other products to test and write about on various social media. This product fits into our blog here so I thought I'd share my findings of this 5oz bag with you all today. I know that I can find these in my local stores so I'm betting American readers can find it as well.

The very first ingredient is dark chocolate made with chocolate, cocoa butter, and cocoa the label says. I wish it had only healthy and natural  ingredients but the list is long and includes, sadly, chemicals and sunflower oils which is not nearly as bad as palm oil but still why does it need added oils at all? The crunchy part of these comes from oats, rice, bran but there is soy here as well in case you have an allergy. In case you have a fruit allergy here is the list of fruits in solid, puree, or juice from: apple, pomegranate, raspberry, blueberry, lemon, and cranberry. As you can see in this photo of two servings, the pieces vary greatly in shape and size; the bigger pieces are more fruity and less crunchy.

The initial flavor is light chocolate that soon becomes a general fruit then returns to a darker chocolate; the intensity of these two flavors depends on the size of the piece as I said above. The crunch is there from the first bite through the last and it doesn't take many bites to finish. The better pieces have less crunch and more of a chewiness to them again reflecting the amount of fruit in them. The fruit is really generic though so if you don't like one of them (or even all of the fruits listed in the previous paragraph) you won't be able to really tell them apart of the over all sweet and tangy flavor. In terms of nutrition these are not bad though given the ingredients I'm really shocked that one serving only has 1g of dietary fiber in them; you'd get that from just dark chocolate, shouldn't the grains and fruit add more?

You can snack on this like junk food but until just a candy bar this has more flavor and is definitely lower in calories and more fun to each piece by piece.  I shared it with my husband and he loved it, too.  I think this goes on our list of possible purchases in the grocery store for our family. What about you? Have you tried this?

Comments

Barrett said…
Brookside, yum yum. I love all their offerings!
This was our first testing of and piece about their products. It was good but I'd like to be able to test their pure chocolate some time.