And the winner of the losers is....

Have you ever wondered which is better for you? Skittles, Reese's Pieces or M&Ms? Well, I guess I have candy on the brain cause I just sat and figured it out and want to share my findings with the world.

I found this helpful video that backs up my label reading methods, minus some details like how high fructose corn syrup is the most evil of all. Though sugar is bad, very bad for you, I prefer it to artificial sweeteners, with the exception of Xylitol and Stevia, which rock. I'm pretty sure the others give you cancer. Hydrogenated anything is bad. Based on this criteria here's my findings, since I can't make a table on blogger, I made the findings for Skittles in RED, Reese's in ORANGE, and M&Ms in BLUE:

Ingredients in order of naughtiness:
Sugar: 47g, 27g, 23g
Fat: 7g, 6g, 2.5g
Calories: 250, 220, 210
Sodium: 80, 25, 10

In addition to the above findings, I had to look at the list of ingredients to made an educated decision as to which was the healthiest. The sugar content in Skittles is so astronomical that I had to drop them out of the race completely. The fact that they are also stick to your teeth so badly points to their need of complete eradication from the face of the Earth, except that we all love them so much.

The final two. The first ingredient for Reese's was sugar, and the first for M&M's was chocolate which contained sugar then sugar was the next ingredient, so I figured they're about the same (the grams listed backs this up). The protein from the nuts in Reese's is a bonus, but so is the milk in the chocolatey M&Ms. It came down to the fact that M&M's contained less than 1% of corn syrup and Reese's listed less than 2% of it in their ingredients. They basically tied since Reese's has 5g of protein and M&Ms had 2g, but M&Ms, I think, are slightly better for you*.

I confess my bias is for the Reese's. I was rooting for them all along. We have a candy dish we keep in the laundry room, I'm not sure how it got there. It's always filled with M&Ms. We used to bribe Z to use the potty with them. We gave up on that, resigned to have the first college student in diapers someday. He gets them for helping with the laundry now. I don't really like M&Ms. Never have. I eat a few when I walk by though as I'm nearly always hungry when I'm nursing. I always wish they were Reese's Pieces. Now that I've done my study, I know for a fact that it's not much worse at all to have Reese's in the bowl....except that it is, because I'd eat them all during my laundry helper's nap time.

*findings are relative and not approved by the FDA