Chips

Chips have been getting a bad wrap over the last few years. Some of it is justified and some is maybe hysteria. For all that chips are a favourite snack food. Children it seems are rather more attracted to them than most and will often leave much healthier snacks for a handful of potato chips.

Why has this change of attitude arisen.

The low carbohydrate craze has many people turning their attention to fats. Examining what kind of fats they are consuming and how much of it they are taking in.

Large amounts of fat or of the combination fat and carbohydrates causes obesity, heart disease and other problems. The different types of fat have very different effects on the health. The fat consumed is generally a mixture of trans fat, saturated fat and unsaturated fat.

 

Chip Snacks and Fats

 

As a snack food Chips are very appealing. They are tasty, readily available and easy to eat.

The manner in which many have been prepared in the past has led to a large amount of trans fats being present.

This type of fat should ideally not be a part of the diet at all. Margarine, cookies and often bread contain this type of fat. It is therefore important to watch out for snacks that might add to this.

 

Alternative Chips

Now it's not all bad news for Chip lovers.

Manufacturers have made an effort to change the types of oils and fats they use to prepare your Chips. These contain more of the good fats (Conola, Olive Oil) that we need and less of the bad.

Today many of our favourite chips are oven baked chips and not fried. The oven baked chip has much less fat and also far less trans fat. The higher temperatures of frying are missing and the lower quantity of fats mean less trans fat is produced. A far healthier Chip snack.

The latest chip technology is "freeze dried chips". In this process the chip is made by peeling, slicing and cooking the potatoes, then freezedrying them. The latter half of the process removes the moisture from the potato, leaving it "crispy, light and satisfying". (So the adds would have us believe.)

"A zero-fat potato chip that has no funky additives, is crispy and heres the real test, addictive? "

 

Potato Chip No More

As for the humble potato it is now no longer the chip king. We have a whole range of healthy chip alternatives.

 

Veggie Chips

Rice Chips

Banana Chips

Soy Chips

Fuji Apple Chips

Nacho Chips

Sweet Potato Chips

Pineapple

Strawberries

 

Is It All Over for the Humble Potato Chip

 

Well if the sale of potato chips are a guide I would say, NO!

Chips still sell well and are as popular as ever with most adults let alone children.

Chips are not seen as necessarily the first snack food to reach for anymore. This is due more than anything by the wider range of snack foods that are available to us today.