Want advanced access to my weekly Chewsday Reviews?

Every Tuesday morning receive the latest Chewsday Review delivered directly to your inbox.

Macro Lentil Bites | Chewsday Review

This week’s Chewsday Review comes from a reader request – Woolworths Macro Lentil Bites in Pumped up Pumpkin. Now I can’t imagine someone getting too ‘pumped up’ over a lentil bite, but a healthy chip alternative made with veggies? Sounds too good to be true! Let’s take a closer look.

Ingredients

Ingredients
Lentil Flour (26%), Chickpea Flour (20%), Sunflower Oil, Maize Flour, Potato Starch, Rice Flour, Pumpkin Powder (5%), Salt
It’s great to see that the two first ingredients are lentil flour and chickpea flour – lentil bites that are actually made of lentils
The third ingredient is sunflower oil, which is expected for a chip type product. Sunflower oil is a healthy oil which is high in unsaturated fats (the good kind).
These contain only 5% pumpkin – this is acting as a flavouring instead of contributing to vegetable intake (not that I would expect it to if it is in a chip!)
Allergens: None! This product doesn’t contain any of the top 9 allergens.

Positives

These chips come within healthy guidelines for sodium with 359 mg of sodium per 100 mg sodium. Regular ol’ potato chips have about 1.5x this amount of sodium. One 18 g serve contains 65 mg sodium, which is around 10% of a toddlers recommended daily sodium intake.
These contain some fibre, at least a little more than regular chips. An 18 g serving contains 1.4 g of fibre per serve. For comparison, 1/3 of a cup of lentils contains 3.4 g of fibre.
Individually packaged makes these very convenient for on the go (although having lots of packaging isn’t very kind to the environment).

Negatives

These have 16.7 g of fat per 100 g – higher than healthy guidelines. Most of this is healthy unsaturated fat though, and saturated fat is within healthy guidelines. That is also less than half the fat of regular Smiths chips (34.8 g/100 g).
Per 100 g, these are 3x the price of regular potato chips.
For a product flavoured as ‘Pumped Up Pumpkin’, the amount of pumpkin in these is next to nothing. It’s actually less than 1 g per serve.

Marketing

Winner of Best Allergy Friendly Snack (2021 Healthy Food Guide Awards).
‘Yummy, hidden veggies’ – I don’t love that these promote ‘hidden vegetables’ that your ‘little one will never know about’. I mean this hidden veggies stuff appears THREE times on this packet. But to be honest, no one is counting these as a vegetable. They might be a nutritious snack, but a vegetable they are not. Additionally, hiding vegetables in foods isn’t a strategy I recommend as it doesn’t help your little one learn to actually like veggies in plain sight.

Alternatives