Diet-friendly ballpark snacks

Are your ballpark food decisions a swing and a miss? If you're more concerned about the concession choices than who's on first, you run the risk of consuming more than a day's worth of calories and fat before the seventh-inning stretch. Although Americans' favorite summer pastime is a ballgame, we often treat it like a fried-food festival. Add one of these better stadium snacks to your lineup to avoid an upset.

Peanuts are a great source of heart-healthy fat, but if it's game seven, bottom of the ninth, with two outs, two men on base, and your team's down by two, you're going to munch through more than a single serving. A half-cup of shelled peanuts contains 414 calories and 36 g of fat, which can take more than 2 hours to burn off on the treadmill, says Jim White, a spokesman for the American Dietetic Association and owner of Jim White Fitness and Nutrition Studios in Virginia Beach, Va. Shelling peanuts is a good way to keep calm during a nail-biter, but that anxiety will return when you step on the scale.

Take a cue from pro sluggers and switch to sunflower seeds. Like peanuts, sunflower seeds are packed with heart-healthy fat, but shelling a quarter-cup of these tiny seeds will get you through more innings than the peanuts, and for fewer calories and grams of fat, says White. What's more, you can still shell your way through a nerve-racking ninth inning while making a huge dent in your daily-recommended intake of vitamin E -- just 1 ounce of sunflower seeds contains 76 percent of what you need.

Ice cream sounds like the perfect frosty treat for a scorching summer day spent baking in a stadium. But 1 cup of chocolate ice cream can set you back close to 500 calories and packs almost 11 teaspoons of sugar. The dairy in ice cream contains some nutrients, such as calcium and protein, but it's a rookie mistake to order a cone over the next, healthier option.

This mound of colorful ice is surprisingly low-cal with only 30 calories and 5 g of sugar. "You still get to have a sweet snack," says White, "but it's mostly ice and actually provides a little extra hydration."

When surrounded by greasy burgers and fries, chicken fingers get an undeserved healthy reputation. But at about 100 calories a finger, this deep-fried basket meal quickly turns into a waistline buster unworthy of the big leagues. Add 2 tablespoons of ranch for dipping and you tack on 200 more calories. "If you decide to go with chicken fingers, be careful about the sauce," says White. "Ketchup, at 10 calories a teaspoon, is a better option than a creamy sauce like ranch or honey mustard."

This ballpark staple is a lightweight when it comes calories -- only 214 calories for an all-beef dog in a bun. Top it off with a few squirts of mustard, says White. One teaspoon contains only 3 calories and nearly no fat. If that dog sounds too boring for your tastes, add 2 teaspoons of sauerkraut for only 5 to 10 more calories. "It surprises a lot of people that hot dogs are pretty low-calorie," says White. "It's all of the toppings that pile on the calories. Keeping it simple will save you."

A plain salted pretzel isn't the healthiest pick, but it's the lesser of two food evils with fewer than half the calories of nachos. Make it an even better choice by flicking off the giant salt crystals, says White. There is still plenty of sodium in the pretzel dough without the extra dusting of crystals.

Cotton candy isn't a terrible treat when served carnival-style on a stick, but stadiums can pack as many as four puffs of this sticky stuff into a single bag. Each 1 ounce puff contains about 120 calories, and what's worse is that you don't feel like you're eating anything. It's just too easy to put away 500 calories of pure sugar and still have room for that basket of nachos.

As long as you don't eat the entire box, Cracker Jack is a ballpark classic worth enjoying, says White. Half the box of this caramel and peanut-coated popcorn treat has 210 calories and only 3.5 g of fat. Plus the crunchy snack offers a bit of protein and fiber to help fill you up -- a claim that its airy, melts-to-nothing rival can't make. Those kernels in Cracker Jack are coated with more than 6 teaspoons of sugar, but they're still a vast improvement over cotton candy, which is not much more than pure spun sugar.