Oh, Welch.

I made an attempt to buy some healthy on-the-go snacks for the first leg of a 2000 mile (~3220 km) road trip. Usually, I don't buy the little prepackaged bags, but I was short on time and felt that it would be easier to manage and control the portions as well. I picked up a pack of Welch's Tropical Sensations dried fruit to satisfy the eventual sweet tooth. Although dried fruit certainly has its drawbacks, it's portable and an alternative to the misleadingly called "fruit" snacks (which is another topic in itself). On the package, it says, "bursting with sweet natural goodness." Well, after I tried it, I took a closer look at the ingredients and realized that what it's bursting with is sugar! It turns out that sugar has been added to the naturally sweetened fruit (and these naturally occuring sugars are already concentrated in the drying process). In the end, one 0.9 oz (25.5g) pouch has 21g of sugar, equivalent to 5 1/4 teaspoons.

In an attempt to differentiate the added sugars from the natural sugars, I went to www.nutsonline.com and calculated the average amount of sugars in their natural pineapple, natural papaya, and organic mango. If these three were chopped up and put into 25g packages (with an equal amount of fruit distributed), the sugar content would be ~10g. Picture a handful of dried fruit with almost 3 teaspoons (2.75 if you want to be exact) of sugar on top. Not my idea of a delicious & nutritious snack.

To make matters worse, I compared this with their "fruit" snack nutrition data. The same size package has 10 fewer calories and 12g of sugar. This means the sugar they put in the "fruit" snack is almost the same amound they added to their dried fruit. The fake stuff also has vitamins A, C & E added to it. Needless to say, Tropical Sensations is not worthy of replacing the fake fruit snacks.

So, Welch's Tropical Sensations is the first to be inducted into my Hall of SHAME. Shame on Welch's for their nutritional disservice and shame on ME for not reading the label before I bought it.