I doubt Naked Cookie marketing folks are telling people to eat their cookies as mid-workout snacks. But you could: With 10g of protein, 1g of sugar, and 7g of fiber? These things are better for you than spinach.*

Gluten-free (GF), defatted almond flour instead of traditional wheat flour, with 10g of grass-fed whey protein, and only 200 calories means we can put these in the “healthy snacks” bucket and not look back. The cookies are dense, so like a protein bar, you’ll feel full after you eat just one. Need dessert and counting calories? Naked Cookies will be perfect — one is enough and one is filling.

But, are they tasty?

Any good-for-you food masquerading as a dessert is part of a “How to fake out the brain” strategy. Otherwise we’d all be eating gummy bears and milkshakes for breakfast. A positive with the Naked cookie (from Naked Nutrition) is that it feels like an actually-cooked, soft-baked cookie. A lot of manufactured soft cookies are like unheated dough in the shape of a cookie. When you eat Nakeds, you’ll think you’re eating a baked good.

Another positive is that the almond flour feeeeels like what most of us expect from flour. Five years ago, eating GF baked goods was a terrible experience of crumbly saw dust. With Naked cookies, if you had told me these aren’t gluten-free, I’d have believed you.

The flavor of the chocolate chip Naked Cookies are OK. Not great, not bad. The chocolate chip doesn’t really taste like chocolate, so it’s a bit samey throughout. One bite isn’t different than another. Plus, as a whole, the cookie isn’t very sweet. It only has 1g of sugar, which comes from Stevia (in the chips) and fruit juice. Sweet ≠ taste of course, but I wanted them a tad sweeter. My wife, however, disagreed. She liked the light sweetness.

I have eaten a few as a mid afternoon snack, when I’m looking for a little energy, and these are solid for that: a tad sweet, filling but not loaded with calories.

The bottom line: these high protein, power-bar-like GF Naked cookies are good to eat, especially when you want to hold on imbibing too much real dessert, and want something that will fill you up fast.

*Spinach only has 5g of protein per 1 cup. But of course these cookies aren’t better for you than spinach. Do you believe everything you read on the interwebs? People: Eat spinach before you eat any cookie, no matter what it’s made with. (The previous sentence brought to you by moms and dads everywhere.)