Chips might not be what you think

Maybe, maybe not, so check the ingredient list for sneaky starches and flour, Ellie Krieger writes.

It seems nearly everything in the produce aisle — whether it’s kale, apples or bananas — now comes as chips. Manufacturers seem to be hoping that shoppers — approximately 90 per cent of whom don’t get the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables (not including fried potatoes) — will turn to chips to help fill the gap.

But are fruit and vegetable chips any better for you than regular chips?

Before kale chips even existed on supermarket shelves, I learned that tossing kale with oil and salt and baking it turned it into a crispy snack that would thrill my daughter.

I definitely count that as a vegetable. The amount of oil and salt I use is about the same as if I had sautéed the greens. Gauging from the many recipes online, many leafy greens and root vegetables are easily chip-ified. I also make fruit crisps by slicing apples or pears thinly and baking them until they’re crunchy.

And I count those as fruit. Granted, baking destroys vitamin C, which is especially heat sensitive, and some antioxidants, but minerals, fibre, protein and vitamin A are retained. Dehydrating fruit concentrates its sugars, making it more calorically dense. But if my daughter, her friends and I are having that much fun eating kale and apples, it seems worth the trade-off, especially if the chips replace less-healthy snacks.

Many packaged chips are pretty much the same: Whole vegetables and fruit, with perhaps some oil, salt and seasonings added, which are baked or otherwise dehydrated until crisp. Take the popular snap pea crisp, for example.

The brands I found are made with snap peas, salt and oil and have essentially the same nutritional profile (except for less vitamin C) as if you cooked fresh snap peas in a little oil with a pinch of salt.

But it’s easy to mindlessly overeat them (getting too much oil and sodium in the process) in a way that isn’t an issue with raw or simply cooked fresh vegetables. The same goes for packaged fruit chips. It’s easy to find brands that have one simple ingredient — say, apples — and they are a delicious and healthy snack. But unlike when you make them at home — which gives you a built-in stopping point because you can only make them in relatively small batches — buying them by the bag could lead to mindlessly downing several apples’ worth in one sitting. Other products are really just regular chips in a kale coating. At the worst end of the spectrum, I found a product sold simply as “kale chips,” which you might pick up thinking you are getting a green vegetable.

But their ingredient list revealed they were mostly made of potato starch and potato flour and contained kale powder. They lack the fibre, iron and vitamin A of chips made mainly of whole kale, and have nearly twice the sodium of regular potato chips.