Walk into a supermarket today, and you’ll be spoilt for choice when it comes to “healthy” snacks. Millet chips, ragi cookies, jowar puffs, protein bars, seed crackers, beetroot chips, spinach chips, baked namkeen, roasted makhana and quinoa snacks — the options seem endless. But how healthy are these snacks really, and what should you look for before picking one off the shelf? In this edition of HT Lifestyle’s series, ‘Indian Food Decoded,’ we spoke to Lakshmi Kale, head nutritionist at Nutrition In Sync, to decode what’s actually in some of our favourite “healthy” snacks.
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Grain chips
According to Lakshmi, millets are nutritious whole grains, absolutely. But once they are turned into a highly processed chip and combined with starch, oil, salt and flavourings, the fact that there is millet in the recipe doesn’t suddenly make the entire packet a healthy food. The same goes for jowar puffs, ragi snacks and multigrain crackers. The grain used matters, but so does the final product. “A nutritious ingredient can be part of a snack without making the entire snack nutritionally equivalent to the original food,” highlighted Lakshmi.
