The skinny on...Warburtons sandwich thins

The older I get, the less likely you are to find ostensibly diet products in my kitchen. One of the lessons that I have learned over my years of Weight Watching, of which I still need to remind myself on a regular basis is, I never need as much food as I think I do (i.e. I am fundamentally greedy) and another is that quality is almost always better than quantity. It is for this reason that I have stopped buying low fat plastic spreads – I eat real butter, just in a measured way. And, much as I am a fan of their eating plan, I very seldom purchase Weight Watchers branded products. I just don’t like them that much.

Of course there are exceptions. While my aim is that the recipes and products that I talk about on this blog are healthy-living friendly rather than expressly designed for us slaves to the calorie counting, I do sometimes have to bend my own rules, especially when it comes to dairy. Take the asparagus cream pasta I made last week for example – I used Elmlea, a cream alternative, which, the website tells me, is made of buttermilk and vegetable oils. I sometimes choose reduced fat cheese for cooking with and I almost always eat reduced fat yoghurts rather than the real deal. You pick your battles, depending on your taste.  And I don't think that there is anything wrong with a bit of compromise.

The actual point of this post was to enthuse about a new product I have stumbled across, after years of reading about them on American food and dieting blogs – sandwich thins ( and I should add at this point that I pretty sure that no one in the Warburtons marketing department knows I exist, particularly as that last line sounds a bit like marketeer speak.)

As far as I can see it, the point of the sandwich thin, which is basically…a square, flattish, slimmish bread roll type thing but without a crust (er, am I selling it yet?  See, definitely not in the employ of Warburtons!) is that it minimises the points (calories, grams of carb etc. etc.) that you spend on the receptacle which you are using to convey your sandwich filling to your mouth. Don’t get me wrong. I am a massive fan of bread – proper, yummy, warm, crusty bread. But when I eat a sandwich, I’m more bothered about what is in the middle of the bread. Otherwise I’d just be eating the bread on its own. Well, thickly smeared with butter anyway.

The thins are 3 pro points each and, I think, around 100 calories. And, as I discovered at breakfast time on Sunday, they are just about the right size to accommodate a fried egg (done in just the merest teaspoon of oil). Hurrah.