What’s worse than a candy bar?
A candy bar dressed up as a granola bar. Or chips pretending to be vegetables. These are the worst snacks out there.
What makes these snacks so bad is that they LOOK like they’re healthy. They have labels that make them SOUND healthy. Your friends might have even told you they ARE healthy.
This list isn’t meant to make you reevaluate your entire life.
What it is meant to do is help you get a little closer to an everyday healthy.
These are the 8 worst snacks you’ve probably been told are healthy
Baked chips
Sorry guys. Nutritionally these are almost worse than regular chips. Not because they have more calories or fat (they usually have about 30% less, which ends up being about a 40 calorie difference – big whoop). It’s because they usually aren’t ALL potato.
At least regular chips have 3 ingredients that you can recognize: potatoes, oil, salt. But baked chips are mostly some kind of dehydrated potato powder combined with fillers and binders, plus other things to turn dried potato flakes into a baked potato “chip”. You’re 100% better off with a baked potato. Or a carefully portioned serving of real potato chips. Serving sizes are queen.
Veggie straws (also known as those tri-colored veggie chips)
You know which ones I’m talking about. The pale, kinda of pastel shades of red, green and white chips that are usually called “veggie chips” (or straws or sticks). Or worse: BAKED veggie chips. The companies that make these REALLY want you to believe these are like eating vegetables.
So let me be the first to tell you that it’s SO not the same thing. I promise you they have almost no vegetables and practically zero fiber (fiber is pretty much a hallmark of an actual vegetable). They’re also going to have a ton of non-vegetable added fillers. These salted and fried vegetables fakers are not a healthy snack. You’re better off with a handful of nuts or a some actual vegetable thing that didn’t get processed into the shape of a straw.
Store bought smoothies. Really any kind of juice, except maybe, vegetable juices.
Smoothies are one of the biggest scams out there. They’re almost all sugar. Sure there’s probably some kind of nutrient profile in there that’s pretty decent: lots of potassium, some magnesium, a good amount of vitamin C. But nothing will outweigh the 300+ calories you’re getting that’s mostly just sugar.
And while we’re on the subject, there’s no such thing as a healthier natural sugar. Yes natural (meaning it’s a not artificial sweetener like aspartame or sorbitol) is better than the fake stuff, but sugar is still sugar. Carbs (and sugar is the most carb-iest of the carbs) have their place, but complex carbs rule the world and should be where most of your sugar is coming from. You’re not getting any of that from a smoothie that comes out of a container.
If you love smoothies, make your own. From whole fruits and vegetables. So you get everything from the fruit and not just the sugar.
Pretzels
Pretzels are not the worst snacks on this list, but they aren’t doing you any good either. The problem with pretzels isn’t that they are basically UNHEALTHY. It’s that we eat so many of them at one time, the amount we eat makes them unhealthy. Pretzels are basically just crunchy bread covered in salt.
If you can go easy (as in only one serving) and eat it with something protein-related like a slice of cheese or some hummus, you’ll be good. Forgot how to figure out a serving size? Read this before your next bag of pretzels.
Granola bars
It sounds so healthy, doesn’t it? Granola. When I hear the word granola, I get this immediate picture of health food stores in my head. Is it just me? Health food stores are a magical place where only healthy things live and everything you eat will help you lose 10 pounds. The reality is granola bars are some of the worst healthy snacks you can choose.
They are notoriously full of sugar, and usually have a high calorie count that doesn’t match up to the small serving. This just means they rarely fill us up in the first go-round and when foods don’t leave us full or satisfied, we usually go back for more. Which is exactly the opposite of what a snack is supposed to do. If you can, skip them.
Protein (or fiber) bars
If granola bars are at least PRETENDING to be healthy with their whole grains and teeny bit of fiber, protein bars don’t even bother trying to look the part. They’re usually dressed up in some kind of candy bar outfit, and the only thing they can say for themselves is that they’ve got protein.
Well whoop-dee-doo. Those 20g of protein (or fiber) usually comes packaged in a highly processed, artificial sugar heavy, and otherwise limited-nutrient bar. We eat them because the added protein (or fiber) seems to make up for the fact that they’re straight up junk food. If you’ve got to eat them, just know they aren’t doing you any favors. You’re better off eating a hard-boiled egg and a slice of toast.
These might be some of the easiest snacks to grab when you’re starving and not thinking too clearly. But you can do SO much better.
Start here with a list of the BEST snacks on the go and how to pick them. You’ll never fall down a snacking hole again.