light mayo vs light sour cream vs greek yogurt

 

I like creamy sauces and salad dressings on just about anything that I'm making. Since I'm watching my cals, this has meant switching to light Hellman's mayo and light Daisy sour cream. Recently I've introduced nonfat greek yogurt into the mix. If you only look at one number it looks like light mayo has 35 cals, light sour cream has 35 and greek yogurt has 90. But you can't only look at one number. Each one has a different portion size. Let's level the playing field and look at a nutrition facts in one cup. 

One Cup of Hellman's Light Mayo
560 calories
16 carbs
0 protein

One Cup of Daisy Light Sour Cream
280 calories
16 carbs
16 protein

One Cup of Chobani Plain Nonfat Greek Yogurt
120 calories
8 carbs
21 protein

That's a bigger difference than I imagined. And this is the light mayo! Dang. 

While I haven't yet grown to like the taste of the greek yogurt by itself as a snack, I have successfully made a couple sauces already. Mixing it with buffalo wing sauce (0 cals) made for a very low-cal creamy buffalo sauce that I put on a chicken sandwich and a pita pizza. (I got the idea from here, but puposefully skipped the cooking and adding butter step. 2 ingredients, easy mix, boom, done.) I've already made a second batch of my homemade tzatziki which I did use a topping on a pita or english muffin as a snack and it's very good.

I think the next time I need to make a creamy salad dressing, I'll reach for the greek yogurt instead of the mayo. I have a whole list of ideas for how to add more greek yogurt into my life, including a creamy pasta dish and a spinach artichoke dip. 

This stuff is magic.

Edit: One Cup of Hellman's Regular Mayo
1440 calories
0 carbs
0 protein

So 12x the calories of nonfat greek yogurt. Neat.