DIETARY TRENDS COME AND GO; sometimes they make perfect sense, and sometimes they don’t. One current fad, however, comes with an impossibly fun range of names that practically guarantees recognition: the practice of replacing noodles with vegetables cut to resemble noodles.

Zoodles (zucchini), swoodles (sweet potato), toodles (turnip), poodles (parsnip) and a variety of other oodle-suffixed terms are being coined by chefs, bloggers and avid Spiralizer users nationwide.

Spiralizers are either handheld or counter-top slicing gadgets fitted with a revolving brace and a set of knife attachments that allow users to create “vegetoodles” in a variety of shapes and widths. Common models include one for thin vermicelli-like shaped cuts; a slightly wider attachment for a rounded, linguini shape; and a flat knife allowing for wide lasagna-like slices.

Hudson Valley nutrition-focused foodies like blogger Winnie Abramson (Healthy Green Kitchen), lifestyle guru Kevin Lee Jacobs (author of A Garden for the House) and nutrition educator Holly Shelowitz (Hudson Valley Cooking Classes) have hopped on the trend with a variety of veggie-laden “oodle” recipes, and the nutritional advantages clearly add up fast. A single cup of cooked, enriched spaghetti, for example, contains 220 calories, 1 gram of fat and 43 grams of carbohydrates; a cup of raw zucchini—spiralized, sliced or whole—contains only 20 calories, zero fat and 4 grams of carbohydrates.

Common spiralizer brands include Veggetti, the Spiralizer and The Paderno World Cuisine Tri-Blade Plastic Spiral Vegetable Slicer.