The lowdown on snacks in 100-calorie packs

When you need to munch but don’t want to derail your diet, can 100-calorie packs satisfy? We turned up more reasons to pass on those foods than to purchase them. For starters, their looks sometimes aren’t as pictured, some don’t taste like the original, and they cost a lot more, ounce for ounce.

Oreos in a 100-calorie pack have morphed into a chocolate cracker—no cookie discs to twist apart, no creamy insides. York Peppermint Patties have been replaced by flatties—two small wafer bars. Many others look the same but are just a lot smaller. Doritos in the 100-calorie pack, for example, are mini versions of their usual selves, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish have been minnow-ized.

Food formulations can change, but when our tasters compared some products in 100-calorie packs with the regular versions in 2006, only two tasted very similar: Cheez-It Right Bites and Doritos Nacho Cheese Mini Bites. Others were tasty but had flavors that were slightly different from their regular versions; some tasted worse than the originals.

What’s inside?

We also have a beef with the amount of food inside some 100-calorie packs. A 5x5¼-inch package of Entenmann’s Little Bites held a lot of air and two button-mushroom-size blueberry muffins. Judging by the picture on the box, we expected Reese’s peanut butter wafers to be the size of a regular candy bar but found each package held two 3½-inch-long, ¾-inch-wide bars. (Tiny type on the box does note: "Product enlarged to show detail.") And a 100-calorie Doritos bag contained only a large handful of chips. In the 100-calorie world, a 2-cup portion of Boston’s Lite Popcorn seems positively generous.

The price of those 100-calorie packs will certainly lighten your wallet. On average, they cost from 16 to 279 percent more per ounce than the versions in regular packages, according to a study conducted last year by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

No doubt small servings satisfy the urge to eat less-than-healthful food for some people. But a recent study from the University of Kentucky and Arizona State University found that dieters given a set time to nosh actually ate more snacks from small-portion packages than from full-sized ones.

Bottom line

If you can buy snacks in their regular packages and use an ounce of willpower, your wallet will stay fatter.