I'm always pleased when I see new sugar-free candy products on the market. Not that I promote the idea of eating candy - but if you're going to eat candy, it might as well not have teeth-rotting sugar in it! Lifesavers has a great option with their fruit tarts.

The containers are really cool. They are metal, circular, and appear to be non-openable with the little teeth of the lid gripping all the way around. When you push into the very center of the lid, POP, all the teeth open up and the entire lid lifts off! It makes it easy to get to any candy type you want, to share with others, and none of the candy ever escapes when it's in your purse or pocket. They definitely have a very cool design here.

There are different flavor sets. One has watermelon, cherry lemonade and mandarin orange flavors. Another has grape berry, green apple and strawberry watermelon flavors. Each candy is in a traditional O-ring lifesaver shape with a white body and colored sparkles.

The fruit tarts do have a nice tarty sour flavor with hints of whatever fruit or berry they are supposed to represent. My personal favorites are mandarin orange on one set, and grape berry on the other set. My boyfriend gladly eats the other flavors and enjoys them.

The flavors last a reasonable amount of time, although I tend to eat 3 or 4 during a car ride before I stop munching on them. They list a serving size as one candy, which seems a little unreasonable to me. Does anybody really eat just one unit of candy and then stop? Is that like eating a single cookie?

There are about 50 candies in a given container. The stats per candy are:

calories - under 5
fat - 0g
sodium - 0g
carbs - under 1
protein - 0g

the sweetener here is sorbitol and aspartame. I really wouldn't worry about any ill effects from a tiny candy or two (or three or four) - you would have to eat the entire container before you got enough sweetener into you to cause some sort of effect.

In general, I find these tasty and enjoyable. Again, I'm not a big fan of eating candy - but I do keep these containers in my car, to tide me over if I have no "real snack" with me and we aren't near a restaurant. Really though, in the long run, you should try to keep healthy snacks on you so that when you are hungry, you feed your body something nutritious.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books