Alternatives to Chips

If your nemesis is chips, that’s okay, there are ways around that.  Take the chips you crave the most, like Nacho Cheese Doritos, and replace them with a brand of plain potato chips that have a lower sodium content.  Essentially what you are doing is taking a snack that has an ingredient list a mile long, and transitioning to one that is shorter.  Chips are not healthy by any means, but there is a hierarchy to their nutritional value like other packaged foods.  If you like Fritos, for example, switch to white corn tortilla chips and then to blue corn tortilla chips.  Look for chips that are cooked in oils like sunflower oil instead of cottonseed oil (1). 

  

One brand of chip I like every once in a while is called Terra.   It is a brand I recently noticed at my grocery store and sports vegetable chips as its base (sweet potato, parsnip, batata, taro and yuca) and has 50mg of sodium.  I buy the original kind which I don't crave very often.

If you continue to have intense cravings for chips, even after switching to a brand like Terra, try limiting your intake (one bag per week), and making up the difference by making your own chips.

You can easily make tortilla chips in the oven by cutting up tortillas into wedges, coating them with olive oil, lining them out evenly on wax paper and baking them at 400 degrees for 7-8 minutes on each side (2).  Baking your own chips can allow you to choose how much sodium you add, if any at all.  A word of caution about sodium is that one gram is about ½ of a teaspoon (3).  If you are concerned about sodium, 50 mg of sodium, like the amount found in one serving of Terra chips, is only going to be 5% of ½ of a teaspoon.

With that being said, you may be craving chips because you are sensitive to food additives like preservatives, dyes, and artificial flavors; to the corn used to make the chip; or to whatever microbes that may be hanging along for the ride.  A way to test this theory is to see if your salt cravings follow you from one food to another.

For example, if you have intense cravings for salt in foods that you cook yourself, let’s say chili or tacos, or to salt alone, than you may be dehydrated or have a medical condition.  If you crave specific salty snack foods, even when adding salt to the foods you consume, than the problem probably rests not in the salt, but the snack food you are craving.

The end result of transitioning away from chips is to bake your own vegetable chips in the oven.  Several recipes give options on how to bake almost any root vegetable, cut up thin enough, in the oven at a low heat (250 degrees) with or without oil, salt and spices for about 2 hours. The result is a crispy chip, somewhat similar to the chips available in the Terra brand.   

1) http://www.livestrong.com/article/394685-what-are-the-healthiest-potato-chips/

2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZiwSJWeFiA

3) http://www.thekitchn.com/how-much-is-a-gram-of-sugar-really-nutrition-labels-visualized-173972