The Truth About “Healthy” Snacks
Are we just fooling ourselves with pretty packaging?
Oh, the so-called “healthy snack.” A shiny wrapper with a sleek image. A brand with a sexy name — something like “Organixx” or “Naked by Nature.” It’s not just a snack — it’s a lifestyle. When we grab them out of our purses we don’t look like some lazy slobs shoving any old junk into our gobs, but rather highly sophisticated snackers. We even give certain brands to our children because, well, everyone else on the playground does.
Are we paying a premium for self-proclaimed healthy treats that are actually just a bunch of bunk? After reading so much about how “low-fat” foods have just been pumped up with excess sugar I was skeptical about the actual nutritional value so I consulted my cupboard. Here’s what a quick check found:
Salty Snacks: The classic, fried potato “chips” (or “crisps” as we say in the UK) had the most fat (at 30g per 100g). Oven-baked chips had slightly more salt and far more sugar than fried chips (6g vs. less than 1g)! The “veggie straws” were a particularly big shocker with 29g of fat, almost as much as the fried chips! Finally, “oven baked pretzels” had the most sugar at almost 7g.
Yogurt: My children love their “naturally flavoured” children’s yogurts which range from 6g to 8g of sugar (per 100g serving), more than twice the amount of sugar in natural yogurt. Double that amount if you go for those fancy drinking yogurts! Yikes.
Sweet Treats (using the very delicious Oreo as a benchmark): Oreos have 23g of fat and 43g of sugar per 100g serving. The “natural oat bars” I give my children have 19g of fat and 27g of sugar. Not terrible. But the chocolate-covered rice cakes they love have 24g of fat and 30g of sugar! Those natural “fruit roll-ups” have almost no fat but 42g of sugar per 100g (all naturally occurring, of course).
Compare this all to a banana which has 12g of sugar and less than 1 gram of fat per 100g serving. The clear winner.
At the end of the day, this is all quick and dirty and frankly, I’m not an expert. But it was an interesting exercise that caused me to do a few double-takes, especially on the amounts of sugar in certain items. Snacks play such a critical part in a sugar-dopamine link, which is hard to break. These “healthy snacks” make us feel virtuous but really, they aren’t always what they appear to be.
It’s hard to change behaviour all at once so I am slowly cutting sugar and butter from homemade recipes to alter the amount of sweetness we regularly taste. I’ve also tried to shift our household to less snacking and more natural (fruit/veg) or simple (breadsticks/nuts/toast) options (and of course occasional Oreos and ok, lots of dark chocolate). Maybe less sexy but far less sugar, less packaging, and less guilt.
