Noodles leave nasties out of mix

Slendier Angel Hair, $5.99 for 250g. Photo / Wendyl Nissen

I've had many readers ask me to look into this amazing new product. It is amazing because it only has eight calories per 100g and has less than 1g fat, 1g sugar, 1g protein, and 1g carbs per serve, yet provides you with a nice dose of fibre. Oh, and it's gluten-free which is great for a pasta.

These noodles have been sweeping the diet industry worldwide because you can replace pasta with these in your recipes and basically consume nothing. They are also known as Zero noodles or by their Japanese name Shirataki noodles.

Ingredients ( in order of greatest quantity first):

Purified water

These noodles are mostly water - in fact they are 94.7% water.

Konjac flour (5.3%)

This comes from the Konjac yam which is a native in Eastern Asia.

It has large starchy corms which produce flour and jelly. It is very popular in Japan and also China where it has been eaten for centuries as a medicinal food for the treatment of asthma, cough, hernia, breast pain, burns as well as haematological and skin disorders.

Firming agent (526)

This is calcium hydroxide (526) otherwise known as picking lime.

My recommendation

I'm not a great fan of zero food because I believe in getting nutrition and energy from real food, but as a weight loss aid I can see some definite advantages to replacing carbohydrate-heavy pasta with these noodles.

They taste similar to rice vermicelli noodles so would work well in an Asian salad.

Whatever you do with them, they are going to need a strong sauce to add flavour as they are pretty tasteless.

They are also quite chewy and for each 125g you will get 5.1g of fibre, which is very good.

This may be why these noodles are said to keep you full and stop you getting hungry.

And unlike many diet foods there are no nasties in there such as artificial sweeteners, salt or sugar to help with the flavour or additives to help with texture. It's simply yam, water and lime.

Highlights

• Only eight calories per serve.

• 5.1g fibre per serve

• Low in fat, sugar, carbs, protein and salt.