Can Barbara’s Cheese Puffs be a healthy snack for me, a veteran life-long snacker who has diabetes and is losing weight?

Maria and I made our Friday morning stop at the Cambridge Food Co-op this morning, and we’ve been talking about my choices for a relatively healthy snack I can eat. At the same time, we read or watch Endeavor and Morse on my Iphone at night (we never got around to getting a TV and don’t want one.)

As I paid for the cheese puffs, I told our friend Utu, the cashier, that I thought these were a healthy snack for me. “No,” Maria popped up, “they are not healthy.”

This irritated me a bit, an intrusion. Maria and I do not fight much, but these odd disagreements can evolve into more robust arguments. We both have strong ideas about things.

This one stayed small, but we have had some whoppers. And this one was interesting. In a good relationship, we never stop learning about each other.

Cheese puffs, added Maria, “are just not my idea of healthy.”(I should add she does snack on them periodically, and the bag often shrinks during the way, and not just by me.)

My idea about Cheese Puffs first came from a doctor I spoke with about my diabetes and nutrition.

My diabetes is controlled, and my diet is extremely healthy – vegetables, whole wheat pasta, fruit, white fish, brown rice, and crab meat. We live in a sugar-free zone; I have little bread, buy no food with processed sugar, and eat nothing in a package but frozen vegetable dumplings.

The cheese puffs from Barbara come in two ways – the thin, original baked ones and the lighter and very digestible kind that practically disintegrates in my mouth. Some are baked with aged white cheddar cheese. I love them.

I eat them two or three times a week when I have them; I often don’t.

My breakfast is usually hemp and flax granola with Almond milk,  blueberries, raspberries, and sometimes Greek yogurt.

The doctor, a diabetic nutritionist, made an impression on me. We talked about what it means to be healthy.

I know what I can and can’t eat and stick to it (with an occasional small cup of ice cream in the summer).

Maria  said she wasn’t telling me what to do (right!) but believed it wasn’t what she called a “healthy snack.” She didn’t think Cheese Puffs qualified, period.

I disagreed; this was a lot healthier than turning to snacks that are not healthy, which includes most of the snacks sold these days, including those called “organic.”

When we talked, my doctor suggested I consider an ancient whole wheat past called Eikhorn, which I forgot about, but have added to my diet earlier this year. This wasn’t for a snack but for a meal.  I learned a lot about finding healthy pasta.  More on that later.

I did my homework and asked my doctors about Cheese Puffs.

My doctor said I deserved a break once in a while.

If you get the ones with no sugar, low cholesterol, few calories, and little saturated fat, and pay attention to the calorie charts and only have it once a night once in a while, then she said she would consider that a healthy snack, but only about other snacks that misrepresent themselves. Cheese Puffs seemed to be telling the truth.

She said the best snack is no snack for her money, but she’d rather I have a relatively moderate snack than one with lots of sugar and high carbs. That, she kept, would keep me from eating something worse. People monitoring diet and weight need to reward themselves, sometimes, or they inevitably fall off the wagon.

I know that story.

I did my homework and found that Barbara (a brand name) sold baked cheese puffs with 1 gram of sugar, 6 mg of cholesterol, and 13 g of total carbohydrates. The bag has six servings of 22 pieces of 150 calories a serving; it seemed a good snack for me.

If you eat the whole bag, the doctor said, or munch on them all day, that’s not healthy.

She said that if you stick to your serving size and add nothing else, don’t worry much about it. It won’t matter if the rest of your diet is healthy. What makes it beneficial, she said,  is that you can get into the habit of eating one snack you understand and not getting something that is much worse. I call it the “snack trap,” she said; many of my patients fall into it.

Maria disagreed with this rationale. She said that Cheese Puffs are not healthy in the way she defines healthy. She said that her idea of healthy snacks is vegetables, fresh food, nuts, a cookie, and nothing in a package.

“I like to eat a cookie for a snack, nuts, or vegetables. It’s like saying potato chips are healthy,” she said. “When you say Cheese Puffs are healthy, I think healthy is something you get nutrition from. There’s no nutrition in Cheese Puffs.”

This is true, but it does feel like a reward for me for eating so well, which keeps me healthy. I have fallen into the “snack trap” more than once.

I’ve learned in the past few years that the idea of health transcends absolute diets – it includes happiness, meaningful work, good relationships, and creative successes – like my flowers. I would argue that flowers are the healthiest thing I’ve brought into my life since meeting and marrying Maria.

She’s still number one, although unlike me, she can be stubborn and willful (I can hear her scream already.)

I understand what her argument is, and I don’t dismiss it. But I have also found that the more rigid the restrictions on me, the more likely I am to go off the reservation. My regular diet is under the best control ever, and I am losing weight, which is difficult for people with diabetes.

When I see my cardiologist, she looks at me and says I look vital and happy. Is that true? She asks. Yes, I said, it is true.

Then you are healthy, she says.

It is human nature to find enjoyment at times in the most moderate and restrained way possible.

I also snack on cashews and cherries, wheat crackers, and sometimes apples. I don’t have the Cheese Puffs Every night.

Cashews are my second favorite.

Tonight, I’m cooking Eikhorn, the food the doctor suggested,  a very healthy pasta I’ve researched, an ancient grain pasta planted 12,000 years ago that has never been altered or hybridized. It is highly recommended for diabetics or people with blood sugar issues. I mix it with vegetables like kale and vegetables from our garden tonight.

As arguments go, this was a mild and interesting one. No winner, no loser; we are laughing about it.

I’m not close to giving up my cheese puffs, and she’s not pushing me to do so, but I am grateful to be paying such close attention to what I purchase and eat.

After every meal, I use my new diabetes sensor to tell me if my food messes up my sugar. So far, so good. I’m sticking with my cheese puffs.

And I’ve come to like the Einkorn; I mix it with all kinds of excellent and healthy food.

No question about it; it’s healthy. I’m mixing it with our own grown tomatoes.