The sausage that won’t make you porky
GIVEN their reputation for piling on the pounds, sausages aren’t usually found on a calorie-controlled diet. But slimmers are snapping up a new low calorie version after experts gave it their approval.
Porky Lights have only 78 calories each and sales have soared after Slimming World gave them a mere 0.5 ‘syn points’ compared to a typical five for regular sausages.
As a result, they easily fit in to the weightloss organisation’s diet plan which lets followers consume up to 15 ‘points’ worth of higher calorie food and treats a day.
Online forums reveal that dieters are driving more than 30 miles to buy Porky Lights. There are even claims of shoppers arguing in supermarkets as bulk-buyers grab the last remaining packs. They cost £2.25 for a 400g pack of six sausages with 70 per cent pork but only 3 per cent fat.
Surrey-based firm Porky Whites claims it has been inundated by frustrated shoppers begging it to make more of its ‘light’ sausages. One woman on the Slimming World lifeline support group said shoppers at her local Asda were ‘just taking them in boxes’.
The packs were initially released in a limited number of smaller supermarkets. But after word spread of their 0.5 syn value, the suppliers sold them to larger stores. The Porky Whites Facebook page has more than 4,000 likes and almost every visitor post is from Slimming World devotees asking for more of the sausages. Legal secretary Victoria Fenner, 45, said: ‘People love them because they are half a syn but taste like proper butcher’s sausages.’
TV chef Ed Baines, of London restaurant Randall & Aubin, said he found Porky Lights nice and juicy but a bit gristly, although ‘you wouldn’t know they were so low in fat’.
A number of companies have developed diet or skinny sausages. Marks & Spencer’s Skinny Pork Sausages are also 78 calories each. And Quorn offers a realistic meat alternative that has 71 calories.