The recent announcement by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, New Delhi, to ban the serving of unhealthy snacks during their meetings has been long overdue and most heartening.
I am also happy to learn that the snacks chosen to replace the biscuits and samosas are the ones that are truly healthy – roasted gram, puffed rice, dates, walnuts and almonds.
It is well-established that snacking on fruits, nuts, seeds, lentils and whole grains can control hunger pangs, keep blood glucose levels steady, and provide the essential nutrients. Such changes can go a long way to stem the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions that India is struggling to do.
Snacks are often foods that we consume at our workplace or on-the-go, which is why we resort to what is available ready-made in the packaged form. On a recent jaunt to the supermarket, I decided to survey the snacks available.
To my surprise, almost all the popular foods had a diet (‘healthy’) variant on the shelves – be it namkeen, chips or salad dressing.
Once a product is labelled as a ‘diet’ food, it is much sought after. What is disturbing is that the claims made by such products are often misleading.
To find out whether or not a food item is actually healthy, take a good look at the list of ingredients mentioned.
A long list of synthetic ingredients is typically a red flag. Many of these ingredients are likely to be additives, which are of no benefit to the consumer.
Baked snacks are often considered healthy because we assume that they contain less fat. The truth is that baked products could have reasonable amounts of well-disguised fats (oil/trans-fats) to make the product crunchy.
A bowl of baked crispies could have just as much fat as the fried variant, with a marginal difference in the calorie content.
Diet chips, namkeen, biscuits and chiwda are few popular ‘healthy’ snacks. In many roasted or low-fat packaged products, the sugar and salt content is increased to make up for the loss of taste that otherwise comes from the fat.
On the same lines, few snacks claim to be healthy because of the added ‘real vegetables/real fruit’. The amount of dehydrated vegetables added is usually minuscule and hardly adds any nutritive worth to the product.
Similarly, replacing just a small portion of a not-so-healthy ingredient with a healthy one, cannot turn the product around. If only a portion of the refined flour (maida) in bread or noodles is replaced by whole-wheat flour (atta), it is not good enough.
When it comes to picking healthy snacks, we should not go by the claims alone. A closer look at the ingredients may reveal that the regular variant of the snack item is actually better than its diet counterpart!
More importantly, watch out for the sugar, salt and fat content in foods – be it the regular or the diet avatar.
As a rule, unprocessed and unpackaged foods are always the preferable option when it comes to snacking right.