The Joy of Snacking

The quick answer: Snacks are the barometer of a healthy diet.  If you don’t eat well, you won’t snack well either.

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Our Goal

Eat smarter, look better, live longer—that’s the stated goal of this blog.  If there’s a resource that will help you do it better than this blog, please tell us because we haven’t seen it. 

A disaster happened in the 20^th century:  Food was industrialized for profit without proper consideration for health.  The deadly rise of chronic diseases was one consequence.  In the 21^st century we’re sorting through the food rubble we call the modern American diet (MAD) and relearning how to live and be well. 

Sledgehammer Blows

In 2012’s first Healthy Changes we took a sledgehammer to the modern American diet (MAD).  Here is the effect of the first seven changes:

1. Reduce dependence on sweets:  The average American drinks 96 oz. of soft drinks each week.  New goal: one 12-oz drink, or less.
2. Eliminate man-made trans fats:  Zero deep fat fried foods.
3. Take back control of your diet:  Write a weekly menu.
4. Eat a healthy breakfast:  Cereal products must have more natural fiber than added sugar.
5. Be muscular: Exercise 30 minutes most days.  It’s best if you sweat.
6. Return to the plant-based diet of your ancestors:  Eat (USDA recommended) five vegetable servings daily. 
7. Slow aging:  Eat a varied diet of whole foods (especially berries) to maximize antioxidant intake and minimize free radical damage.

Our goal is to rediscover the best way to live and be well.  We’re not trying to live forever, just more fully.

Snack Food

There’s nothing wrong with a snack between meals.  The problem started when Food Inc. decided to make a business of homemade snacks.  Here are some notable factory-made snacks, all featuring sugar as the primary ingredient: 

• Cracker Jacks (first sold at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair);
• Hersey bars (introduced in 1900, 10 cents);
• Tootsie Rolls (1905, first wrapped penny candy);
• Twinkies (1930, cake for life on the go).

Healthy, Affordable Snacks

The goal of this post is to rediscover healthy snacks.  In a prior post we summarized reader’s healthy snacks.  Here are ten ideas for traditional snacks that are wholesome and affordable:

1. Fruit:  Nature wraps some fruits in individual servings, like the apple, banana, orange, and peach.  Purchased in season, they’re a nutritional bargain.  In winter, enjoy dried fruits.
2. Veggies:  Carrot sticks and celery (with PB) are favorites.  But try broccoli, cauliflower, or zucchini with a little hummus.   Important point:  To get your daily five veggie servings, you should get at least one in your snacks.
3. Green Smoothies; easiest way to eat your greens plus you get fruit too.
4. Seeds:  Sunflower seeds are a healthy treat.  Popcorn is a real bargain—put popcorn in a paper bag, staple it closed, and pop it in the microwave.
5. Nuts: But them in bulk at harvest, save them in the freezer, and enjoy year around. 
6. Homemade bread:  This is my favorite snack, toasted with butter.  You can bake a loaf for under a buck if you buy yeast in bulk.  Homemade bran muffins make a great snack; put a batch in the freezer.
7. Homemade granola makes a great snack too.  Try Katie’s Granola Recipe. http://wordofwisdomliving.squarespace.com/home/katies-granola.html
8. Hard-boiled eggs:  A great treat: boil them on Monday and enjoy all week; pastured eggs are high in omega-3 fats.
9. Cheese, especially with bread or healthy crackers, or in a quesadilla.
10. Sardines:  For essential long-chain omega-3 fats, sardines are the best value.  Our grandparents ate them on crackers; we should rediscover the humble sardine.

Healthy Change:  We used the weekly menu rule to take control of food selection.  To control snacking, prepare a snack plate early in the day. 

Please comment:  When we eat regular, healthy meals, we snack less and make better choices.  You can find healthy store-bought snacks but ours are mostly homemade.  The best snacks are minimally processed—whole food snacks are best; we draw the processing line at granola and trail mix.  Please share your favorite snack ideas.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

The Chip Aisle? It’s all OK.

The short answer:  Yes, it’s OK to eat chips . . . on national holidays.  Chips can be one more reason to look forward to Memorial Day, 4^th of July, and Labor Day but don’t make it a habit.  They’re basically fried and salted starch.

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As promised I took a close look at the chip aisle in the local grocery store.  Here’s what I learned:

1.  About 80% of the stuff in the chip aisle comes from one company:  the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo.  Products include Lay’s, Ruffles, Tostitos, Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Sun Chips, Rold Gold, Lay’s Kettle Cooked, Tostitos Artisan Recipes, and Chester’s Puffcorn.  Frito-Lay rules the aisle and grocery stores make a lot of money renting shelf space to the chip companies. 

2.  Whether made from potatoes or corn, the nutrition panel reveals the chips are pretty much the same:  A 28-gram serving has about 140 calories, 6-10 grams of oxidized seed oil, 16-20 grams of refined carbs, and a dose of salt.  (Pretzels, made from flour, have little or no oil but a lot more salt.)

3.  The “original” chips are pretty simple: potatoes (or corn), oil and salt.  It’s the flavored versions—cheesy, BBQ, sour cream and chives, etc.—that have the 20+ ingredient list of odd chemicals.  Fewer ingredients is definitely better.

4.  Chips are an unhealthy processed food, but the manufacturers are clever about dressing them up to look healthy.  Potatoes become whole potatoes; salt is sea salt; corn is organic; and one brand uses expeller pressed oil.  They don’t contain trans fats anymore, but the healthiness of the new high-oleic replacement oils is doubtful.

5.  For those trying to avoid commercially fried foods (a good idea), some chips come baked and contain a little less oil.  Or if you’ve figured out that a baked chip really isn’t much healthier, there is now a “popped” chip cooked using heat and pressure.  There’s no end to how food-like stuff can be processed, is there? 

6.  This store had chips in two areas; the newer had a big sign “Wild Harvest Natural Foods” and included chips dressed up to look healthier.  Natural Tostitos, Natural Cheetos, and Natural Lays seemed to have about the same ingredients as the old “unnatural” version but they sported a wholesome looking package and a higher price. 

7.  Best buy in the chip aisle?  There isn’t one, really, you’re paying $3 to $6 a pound for unhealthy factory-processed commodities.  The best buy is in your home: home-cooked popcorn is healthier, tastier, and lots cheaper. 

Two closing thoughts:

First, thinking of popcorn brought new clarity to this principle:  Our health depends on our choice of home-cooked meals over factory-processed foods.  To protect the family health, we must do our own cooking.  The person of modest means actually has an advantage here.  Because eating out is a luxury they must do it less.  And meals cooked at home from minimally-processed and natural foods will always be healthier.  Call it a tender mercy for the humble.

Second, when we think about the processed food business we tend to lose a little of our faith in the goodness of man.  (I’m already on record that women should head these companies.)  So here’s a faith-restoring story:  I have a friend of many years I greatly respect named Ken.  An undiagnosed health condition (high blood pressure) resulted in kidney failure and Ken was facing the prospect of going on kidney dialysis.  Dialysis isn’t easy; it takes a lot of courage and greatly restricts your life. 

The only escape is to receive a kidney transplant, either from a cadaver or a compatible living person (most of us can get by on one of our two kidneys).  There is a great shortage of donor kidneys—most of the people on dialysis will die without getting one.  Cadaver kidneys are typically good for 10 years; living donor kidneys are good for 20-25 years.  So it’s way better to get a kidney from a living donor (though even a cadaver kidney beats life on dialysis). 

So here’s the good news: this past Friday, Ken received a transplant from an unknown living donor who chose to anonymously donate a kidney.  Ken is doing well.  And his anonymous donor has lifted my faith in the goodness of all humans.

Please share your ideas for healthy snacks to take the place of chips, or of kind acts that affirm the goodness of people.  Oh, and Happy Mother's Day.  Eat whatever you wish today, you've earned it.

the snack plate

A few years ago I was offered a position at a medical device start-up with an improved syringe for performing epidurals.  Mothers are experts on the blessed relief from labor pain given by epidural anesthesia, but often have stories about a complication they or a friend may have suffered.  We thought that our device could reduce the risk of certain complications but what we learned was that doctors are reluctant to switch away from whichever epidural method they were first trained to use. 

Introducing a new medical device is a tedious process so like many start-ups, this company offered a pantry of free snacks.  To keep us near the office, they also provided a free lunch brought in from local take-out restaurants.  The dishes were ordered from a stack of menus and were typically fried foods.  In the beginning I limited myself to salad for lunch, avoided the free snacks, and mostly drank water.  In time I tired of lunching on poorly made salads and began to order cooked dishes—fried in low-cost oils, I suspect.  I also began to snack on the chips, candies and soft drinks offered.  Just an occasional snack in the beginning, but without really noticing my addiction grew.  Within a year I suffered an increase in weight and a troubling decline in health. 

Have you or your spouse had this experience?  The first thing I did was start bringing my own snacks to eat during work breaks.  After I left this company I began to read about healthier eating.  I was continually being surprised—about sugar, trans fats, etc.—by things that I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that were essential to healthy living.  Two years and perhaps a hundred books later I started this blog.  Today’s post is about the snacks we eat—the best indicator of our addiction to unhealthy food.  Here are a couple of reports:

• This N.Y. Times article about classic junk snacks has a list that includes Cracker Jacks, Tootsie Rolls, Double Bubble, Twinkies and the Big Gulp/Double Gulp.  Read it and weep.

• Breakfast sets up the snacks:  Dr. David Ludwig of Tufts University and Children’s Hospital Boston reported that a healthy (low G.I.) breakfast results in 81% less snacking calories during the day, compared to a sugary (high G.I.) breakfast.

• The AJCN article “Does hunger and satiety drive eating anymore?” found in the 30 years from the mid-‘70s to 2006, adult snack calories grew from 200 daily to 470; children increased from 240 to 500 calories.  You know where those calories wind up.

• Another N.Y. Times article, discussed how parental guilt and the decline of planned meals add up to giving in to kids on their favorite snacks (typically the worst food available).

• Factoid:  this year we’ll average about a dollar spent each day on snacks—redirecting this money to healthy food is the best opportunity to improve your diet on a fixed budget.

Snacks are an enormous business in our society.  Take a walk through your grocery store, down the candy aisle, the chip section, the cookie row, and through the cracker area.  (You can remember these as the four “C’s”.)  If this made you thirsty wander by the aisle for sugary drinks—it’s the biggest section.  If there’s an in-store bakery check it out.  These are the most toxic section of the grocery store and it’s a big, profitable business.  People are starting to wise up on toxic snacks and this makes Food Inc. nervous.  They monitor us through research like “Mintel’s Healthy Snacking Report”.  Some recent observations:

• The snack market is divided into 20 snack categories:  cereal, cheese, crackers, cookies, fruit, ice cream, meat snacks, dried fruit/fruit snacks, trail mix, popcorn, chips, pretzels, raw veggies, rice cakes, snack bars, yogurt, bagels/bialys (a flat bread), canned soup, chocolate candy bar, nuts/seeds.

• Food Inc’s big question:  How much taste will we give up for our health?

• Consumers want healthy but they also want tasty.  Corn and potato chips are an example of our bipolar behavior:  72% of consumers eat them but only 4% think they’re healthy.  Ditto for packaged cookies.

• At the other end of the spectrum are nuts and seeds:  79% of us eat them and 87% think they’re healthy.  More expensive, but you get both taste and health.  Add fresh fruit: though just 66% partake regularly, 96% see them as healthy.  (What is the other 4% thinking?)

A high dependence on snacks is an indicator of poor health.  But even healthy people need a mid-morning or mid-afternoon refresher.  Just remember, the more sugar in the snack, the sooner you’ll crave more.  So what to eat?  Here are our favorites:

• Raw vegetables like carrots and celery.  Actually these aren’t my favorites, but it’s hard to get five vegetable servings a day if you don’t get at least one snacking.

• Fruit.  We all have our favorites but cantaloupe and watermelon are underrated.

• Nuts and seeds—not the cheapest snack but a good health value.

• I like nut/dried fruit mixtures: dates with walnuts, or dried mangos with pecans. 

• Popcorn, but not the sugared or microwave products.  Is there a better mix of taste and value than homemade popcorn?

• Yogurt—buy the brand with the least added sugar and add your own fruit.

• Dark chocolate.  I like dark chocolate chips with almonds or walnuts.

• Granola or its cousin, trail mix—purchased or homemade.

• Crackers that meet the grain rule (whole grains; more grams of natural fiber than added sugar).  Yes, I’ll visit the cracker aisle and give a list in a future post. 

Children naturally understand healthy snacks.  A mom told of overhearing her children playing a made-up game: create a healthy snack.  The daughter was the judge of her brother’s entries.  The first brother’s snack was slices of carrot on a Graham cracker.  The next entry was a child’s multivitamin covered with honey.  They have much to learn, but children are teachable and more observant than we realize.

Impulse often drives our snacking and the lack of planning makes for less healthy snacks.  We can also lose track of how much we nibble on in a day.  The solution: Make a snack plate about mid-morning, or whenever you can.  Lay out a healthy mix of snacks for the day and enjoy.  (When I forget to do this, I regret it.)

(Or a snack bag instead of a plate if you work away from home.)

Please comment on your favorite healthy snacks.  (I’m expecting a LOT of comments, please.)

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Healthy Recipe #2: Oven-Roasted Fries

In the post Fat City we promised a recipe for oven-roasted potatoes you can use to replace French fries.  (Restaurant fries are laden with unhealthy oils, including trans fats.  You can fry potatoes at home using healthy oils, but roasting potatoes is easier and better for you.)  Experiment with other starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes.  Feeds three to four people.

Ingredients:

1/8 cup extra virgin olive oil

1  teaspoon minced garlic

1/2  teaspoon dried basil

1/2  teaspoon dried dill weed

1/2  teaspoon dried thyme

1/2  teaspoon dried oregano

1/2  teaspoon dried parsley 

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes, or potato of your choice

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions:

In a large bowl, combine oil and spices (except salt and pepper). Wash the potatoes and cut into wedges, leaving the skins on.  (Thinner wedges are crispier and cook faster.)  Add wedges to the bowl and coat evenly. Arrange on a foil lined baking sheet, add salt and pepper to taste. 

Roast for 30-40 minutes at 425 degrees, flipping the potatoes after 20 minutes to brown on both sides. 

Health note:  Potatoes are avoided by some due to their high glycemic index, which can raise blood sugar.  Combining them with olive oil slows down metabolism and smoothes the sugar spike.  The spices are both flavorful and rich in antioxidants.