Why Chips Are Harmful for Health?

What do experts find in them and is there a safe dose of this one of the most popular snacks?

Chips are the most popular snack in the world and also most harmful for health. In the US, stick-shaped chips are even called "cancer" because of the ontological risks, but people buy them and eat them.

The inventor of chips (from the English word chip – “thin piece”), chef George Crum, First he fried the big potatoes and fed them to the people, but when no one liked them, then he cut the potatoes thinly and fed them to the people then people like thinly chips. He was delighted, and so in 1853 chips appeared.

The cheap snack became very popular during the Great Depression, and after the invention of the potato peeler in 1925, the production of chips began to grow rapidly. Today's chips are not like their "ancestors" from George Crum: they are ultra-thin, crispy, and regular and ribbed, with different flavors and can be stored in a bag for several months.

Everyone Knows That Chips Are Harmful, But Why Exactly?

It happens that a product is useful in some ways and harmful in others, for example chocolate, and potato chips are absolutely harmful, – says nutritionist DR. Jyoti Singh. – Potato starch is a fast carbohydrate, and they disrupt metabolism, accelerate aging.

Chips are fried during cooking, and in the process, end products of gyration are formed. These are cross-links between proteins and carbohydrates, they are stable, accumulate in tissues, and cause tumor growth. High-temperature processing of any oils leads to the formation of compounds with carcinogenic properties that damage the genetic apparatus of the cell.

But that's not all. According to the doctor, when making chips, bad fats, trans fats, or inexpensive vegetable oils are used - soybean, sunflower, corn, which increase the amount of omega-6 fatty acids in the body relative to healthy omega-3 fatty acids. An imbalance of acids causes inflammation, including neuroinflammation when the mood deteriorates, depression develops.

Read Also - Why burgers are unhealthy?

Another Time Bomb In Chips Is Excess Salt

Salt makes any product tastier, and it is cheap for the manufacturer. Therefore, there is an industrial tendency to increase the amount of salt in products. This is a big problem: excessive salt leads to hypertension and other age-related diseases.

The nutritionist notes. – In addition, chips are not so much a carbohydrate product as a fatty one, they are high in calories, and when we eat them for a snack, we greatly increase our daily calorie intake.

Chips are harmful to everyone, but they are more harmful to some. This group includes people over 40 who already have an age-related disease – diabetes, atherosclerosis or arterial hypertension – as well as a tendency to develop obesity, problems with the gastrointestinal tract.

“Chips irritate the mucous membrane, increase acidity, make the development of gastritis, erosive gastritis, stomach ulcers more likely, and the likelihood of fatty alcoholic liver disease, cholecystitis and gallstone disease increases,” says the expert.

Arsenic And Cadmium Additive

In 2021, Food Corporation of India conducted a test of chips, the sample included snacks of 16 brands, including corn and beetroot chips:  All the chips taste OK, but there is little that is good. Four brands of chips were found to have excess cadmium (maximum 10 times) and arsenic (maximum 17 times). Heavy metals accumulate in the liver and kidneys, tubular bones, pancreas, spleen and lead to changes in metabolism. Heavy metals are found in vegetables, in the same potatoes, no one adds them on purpose, of course.

The carcinogen acrylamide, which causes tumors, was also found in chips. FCI found it most in "Delhi Potato" (the norm was exceeded by two times). With additives - flavor enhancers,  There are many of them, but their content is not exceeded, and besides, they are officially recognized as safe.

FCI experts analyzed the composition of chips: most are not made from fresh potatoes, but from dry semi-finished products with the addition of a large amount (up to 60-70%) of potato or corn starch. Corn chips contain the most starch - almost 60%, and potato chips - up to 50%. Beetroot chips have almost no starch. Dried chips, due to repeated processing, are, as expected, even more harmful.

The ratio of proteins, fats and carbohydrates is also sad. Only 3-7% of chips are proteins, carbohydrates are from 55 to 71%, fats are from 25 to 38%. And by the way, beetroot chips are no better than potato chips; they also have 30% fat.

Think about it: chips are one third vegetable fat. That's why they are high in calories - 510-530 kcal per 100 grams. The calorie content of regular fried potatoes is 200 kcal, boiled potatoes - 86 kcal. And the producers don't skimp on salt either: the average is 2.5% salt from the total weight.

Alternative potato and, according to consumers, healthier vegetable chips are not all perfect either. In Lays chips with non-hydrogenated palm oil, the mass fraction of fat is a quarter of the product. In Pringles chips, cadmium and arsenic were found in quantities exceeding the maximum permissible level. And these vegetable chips were not even deep-fried, but only dried.

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Safe Dose of Chips

Of course, even a healthy young person should exclude chips from their diet, but sometimes you really want something unhealthy. Dr. Joyti Singh believes that for a person who does not have age-related or chronic diseases, a safe dose of chips is only 20-30 grams. This is a third of the average package.

Any unhealthy food, even if it does not manifest itself as deterioration in health, leads to a decrease in health reserves. All other things being equal, a healthy person who eats chips is more likely to get gastritis, - warns the nutritionist.

For those who don’t believe that chips are harmful, he suggests measuring blood pressure before and after eating a pack of snacks as an experiment.

We are Looking for a Replacement

No chip lover would think of replacing chips with something similar but healthier: they would no longer be chips. Others may switch from chips to vegetables dried at home without frying.

Even fried potatoes are a better alternative to store-bought chips. Just fry them in refined olive oil, don't add a lot of salt, and eat them with lots of greens and fresh vegetables.