Diet Cookie?

I know. I know. It sounds too good to be true. I met with Dr. Sasson Moulavi, M.D. (aka Dr. Sass), founder of Smart for Life diet cookies a few weeks back. He extolled the benefits of his company’s meal replacement cookie: They are preservative-free, made with 60 percent organic ingredients and – Dr. Sass claims – are a perfect balance of fiber, protein, and complex carbs that suppress hunger. According to the label, each 80-calorie cookie has omega-3 fatty acids, 30 calories, 2 grams of fat and 1 gram of fiber. He recommends you eat 6 cookies a day (breakfast, lunch, and snacks) and top off the day with a healthy dinner. He claims you can lose up to 15 pounds a month – far more than the 1 to 2 pounds a week the FDA and hundreds of other weight loss experts recommend for safe weight loss.

So let’s set aside for a moment that the diet plan may not be the healthiest. How do the cookies taste and do they fill you up? I sampled the chocolate chip cookie and…meh. First off, its texture is more like stale Entenmanns than a fresh Mrs. Fields. The cookie is on the dry side, so you’ll definitely want to have a glass of water nearby. It also left a slight film on the top of my mouth. On the upside, the drizzle of frosting on the top is sweet enough to satisfy the most intense craving and it was solidly edible. In terms of taste, I would put it slightly ahead a Kashi Go Lean Bar and behind a Luna Bar.

The cookie—make that 1 and a half--definitely filled me up. I dug in around 8 a.m. and was stuffed. I couldn’t even finish the second half of my, ahem, second cookie. That was until 12 o’ clock rolled around. I was ravenous for lunch and no cookie, not even two, was going to fill me up. I can’t imagine eating nothing but cookies until dinnertime for an entire week, much less a month.

Final verdict: The cookies are good if you need an easy, on-the-go snack. But as a miracle weight-loss effort, the dream of a diet cookie is too good to be true. (But we knew that already, didn’t we?)

Read about our experience with the Blueprint Juice Cleanse.