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To snack or not to snack

Fruits, nuts and lightly roasted sprouts are some healthy snacks

SNACK ATTACK! Should you or not?

Indian office life runs on snacks and tea. The tea, if you discount the corrosive effect of sugar on teeth, is healthy enough. Though snacks are a different matter altogether. A typical Indian office goer life is incomplete without frequent trips to the canteen for mirchi, samosa, pakoda and hundred other snacks. But all of them have few things in common: loads of oil, plenty of salt and enough calories to make a main meal redundant sometimes.

Some Indian "tiffins" even qualify as snacks that can be had any time throughout the day. A light lunch is often a dosa, poori, vada or such similar fried wonders.

Indians have one of the worst lipid profiles in the world. And our snacks are a significant factor in increasing the Indian cardiovascular and obesity epidemic. We cannot live without our snacks, nor, can we live with them.

Fruits, nuts and lightly toasted sprouts are the healthiest snacks. They provide micronutrients that promote cardiovascular health and fight-free radicals.

Snacks are addictive because they are mostly in primal flavours - sweet and salt. They also exploit our instincts to store up fuel for the future. Thousands of years ago, when food was something you had to catch or climb a tree for, snacking on calorie-rich fruit and honey from beehives kept energy levels up. Now, these instincts build up paunches, lead to pear-shaped figures and clog our arteries.

And how bad are our snacks? Most of our snacks are vegetarian, but that does not make them any less lethal than hamburgers in the long run. Oil, often reheated several times over, is the cooking medium in most hotels.

This oil is full of trans fats, which is amongst the unhealthiest fats. Reheating edible oil also produces carcinogens.

Some health experts advocate complete elimination of snacks from the diet. They feel that three square meals are enough and anything in between meals harms the teeth and spoils the appetite for the main meal. Others disagree. The urge to nibble is a survival instinct hardwired into our brains and eating five or six small meals a day may be a more "natural" way of allaying hunger and ensuring a steady supply of glucose in the blood stream.

RAJIV. M

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