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Best Snacks - Healthy Low Calorie Snack Foods - Pickles

Pickles are crunchy and delicious but did you know pickles are nutritious, as well? Naturally packed with vitamins, pickles are a fat free and low calorie snack. In fact, the average-sized dill spear is only 15 calories!

What To Watch Out For

Nearly all pickles you find in grocery stores contain artificial food coloring. They have a yellowish tint to them that has been added through the use of chemical colors. This is not a natural ingredient and so it is something you want to avoid purchasing. Instead, you want to buy completely natural pickles like the ones you get at Trader Joe's that are made without artificial colors or flavors and that have an extremely low calorie count as well.

An entire jar of pickles may give you only 50 calories or so and yet they can be quite satisfying and take up a considerable amount of space in your stomach, thereby turning off your appetite cravings.

Just don't buy pickles containing any added sugars or artificial colors. Some pickles are, believe it or not, loaded with sugar. They're more like candied cucumbers than pickles. Read the ingredients labels to be sure what you're getting.

By the way, while you're eating pickles, it's an excellent time to take some calcium and mineral supplements, too. The acidity of the pickles will accelerate the absorption of calcium.

Interesting Pickle Facts

• Americans consume more than 9 pounds of pickles per person annually – that’s 20 billion pickles throughout the U.S. each year!
  
  
• Pickling is one of the oldest forms of food preservation… founded in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago!
  
  
• America was named after a pickle peddler – Amerigo Vespucci was a ships chandler who outfitted his ships full of vitamin C-rich pickles to prevent scurvy among crew members
  
  
• Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington, - and even modern day Elvis Presley, Bill Cosby and Fran Drescher are just a few of history’s famous pickle connoisseurs
  
  
• Shakespeare first coined the phrase “in a pickle” in his play, “The Tempest”

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