Thursday, February 4, 2010

Soup-ed Up

I am continuing to eat my way through the bevy of soups that Progresso sent my way a few weeks ago. This week I tried two new-to-me flavors for a couple of lunches, and I thought you might be interested in my thoughts. You can win your own bundle o' soup, too, if you enter the giveaway by Friday (that's tomorrow!).

On Tuesday, I packed a can of Light Chicken and Dumpling soup for lunch, and my microwaved bowl is pictured above. You may noticed that there's not a lot of liquid in said bowl. That's because I drain some of the liquid off. If I don't, I feel really bloated and uncomfortable, possibly from all the salt. Progresso is really good about keeping their soups low in unhealthy fats and chock full of veggies, but the salt content is pretty excessive. One can of Light Chicken and Dumpling soup contains nearly 60% of your daily sodium intake! That's a lot, in my opinion.

Thankfully, I don't eat a lot of salty foods, so I figure that I'm pretty safe on the soup front. Besides this soup has some nice nutritional stats, especially if you're being careful about diet and weight loss. Plus, it was fairly tasty. I felt a bit nervous about the look of the turd-like (yes, I did just use "turd" to describe food!) dumplings, but they ended up tasting pretty good. My one complaint is that I would have liked the dumplings to be made from a whole grain flour.

For Wednesday's lunch I made a meal of another new variety, the Light Italian Style Meatball soup. I tend not to go in for meat dishes, and meatballs are especially not my thing. However, I really did enjoy this soup. It seemed to have a lot of veggies, and I liked the contrasting texture of the meatballs and pasta pieces. What's more, this soup smelled really appetizing and, well, Italian. Yum! Again, though, whole wheat pasta would not have been amiss, and each can contains 40% of your daily value of sodium. And another thing -- if this is a meatball-based soup, where is all the protein? Each can only offers 6 grams of protein.

To sum things up (and because I like lists), here's a rundown of my Progresso soup thoughts.

Pros:

  • the ease of packing and prep (2 minutes in the microwave = lunch! with veggies!)
  • good flavor
  • low calorie (good for those hoping to lose a few pounds) and low in unhealthy fats
  • decent price, and many of the varieties are available at bulk stores like Costco

Cons:

  • the high sodium content
  • too much liquid in each can (I want more veggies!)
  • there could be so much more nutrition in each can (whole grains, more veggies, more protein)

What do you think of canned soup? Want to win some?

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