Taste Test Tuesday: Weight Watchers Chocolate Chip Soft Cookies

My first thought after tasting the new Weight Watchers Chocolate Chip Soft Cookies (individually wrapped) was, "I like my chocolate chip cookies with a bit more chocolate than cookie." They are indeed "soft" cookies. Each cookie is worth 1 Weight Watcher point mainly because they have pumped up the fiber (which lowers the points in the Weight Watchers point system).

Without the fiber fortification, each cookie would be worth 2 points.

Is the fiber coming from the use of whole wheat flour? Well...no, the first ingredient is enriched wheat flour. The second ingredient is invert sugar, the third is chocolate chips, and the fourth is sugar. Just in case you wondered...there are 8 grams of sugar per cookie, which computes to 36% calories from sugar.

A little further down the ingredient list you'll come to inulin, which they describe as a "natural extract of chicory roots". Bingo! What do we know about inulin? It's considered to be a "low-digestible carbohydrate" which means it is incompletely or not absorbed in the small intestine but is partly fermented by bacteria in the large intestine. Manufacturers often use inulin, also considered to be a prebiotic, as a fat replacement.

How does it taste?
These cookies taste pretty good and they seemed to appeal somewhat to the other people that sampled them. I prefer homemade cookies from the oven made with part whole wheat flour, but admittedly that takes a bit more culinary cunning than opening up a box of these cookies.

Each cookie contains:
90 calories, 2.5 g fat, 1 g saturated fat, 18 g carbohydrate, 8 g sugar, 5 mg cholesterol, and 4 g fiber.

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