Written by Joy Diggs, CPT, MS, RD, LD, WLS
Certified Personal Trainer
Registered and Licensed Dietitan
Digg Deep Fitness
While scoping through Kroger in preparation to take a client on a grocery store tour, I came across a bag of veggie chips:
I thought it was a great way to eat veggies throughout the day and get in some vitamins and minerals. But I decided to take a closer look and flipped the bag over to read the nutrition facts:
Vitamin A- 0%??? Vitamin C-0%???? What?!? What kind of vegetable is this? I was confused. So, I read the ingredients….
Ooooh, okay. So this was pretty much just a potato chip. They just add spinach powder and beetroot powder to color the chips and make them LOOK healthier than they really are. Gotcha. Let’s compare to a regular ‘ol Lay’s potato chip.
So you save yourself about 30 calories, and 4g of fat, but the Lay’s chip looks like it actually provides more nutrients! Vitamin C- 10%, Vitamin E- 6%, Thamin- 4%, Niacin- 6%. Vitamin B6- 10%, Magnesium- 4%, Zinc- 2%. Really?!?
This led me to wonder if ANY veggie chips offered more vitamins and minerals like….uh… real veggies. This is what I found:
The brands above stood out to me with their marketing tactics. One bag was labeled REAL veggie chips, but still no vitamins or minerals besides the 4% iron. And, I thought for sure that Simple Truth veggie chips would be healthier, but nah. Same fiasco. I kept looking and looking, and then found these:
Wait a second. Did I just find a veggie chip that contains a lot more veggies besides potatoes AND has vitamins and minerals? #Winner. I do want to point out that some of the vitamins and minerals are “nutrients from whole food concentrates,” which I had never heard of until then. Whole foods are food that are unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and refined as little as possible, before being consumed (1). Whole food concentrates are whole foods that have been dehydrated and made into a capsule, tablet, or liquid (2). So this just means that the spinach, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, beets, and shiitake mushrooms were concentrated and then added to the chip recipe.
Another reason I like this brand of veggie chip is because of the serving size, which is huge. One thing I don’t like is that a serving is listed as “1 oz.” on the nutrition label (I mean, who can count out 1 ounce of chips without having a scale?). Luckily, I do own a shipping scale, so I measured out to see what one serving looks like.
Not bad, at all! So, if you’re craving something crunchy, I definitely recommend you try these Veggie Stix. I found them in the organic section of Kroger for $3.59. Try them out and let me know what you think!
References:
1. Wikipedia website. Whole Food. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_food. Accessed August 15, 2014.
2. Natural Awakenings website. Whole Foods vs. Vitamin Supplements. Available at: http://www.wakeupnaturally.com/Westchester-Putnam-NY/March-2012/Whole-Foods-vs-Vitamin-Supplements/. Accessed August 15, 2014.
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