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Potato Chips the Way They Used To Be

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Saratoga Potato Chips

I have a soft spot for Saratoga Springs, New York, home of Skidmore College, my alma mater.  Saratoga is also known for  — to name a few things — the Battles of Saratoga (1777, a turning point in the Revolutionary War), its spa, Saratoga spring water (which I couldn’t stand the first time I tasted it), and another of my favorite spots, the racetrack with its incredible wooden stands.

What I didn’t know is that Saratoga is also credited as the birthplace of American potato chips.  Originally called Saratoga Chips, they are usually credited to George Crum, the Native- and African-American chef at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs who first prepared them in 1853.

In the 1920s chips were handed out in wax-paper bags. In the 1930’s they were packaged and became a commercial snack food.

We now call them plain old potato chips, Saratoga having vanished from the name.  There’s another big difference, too.  To make classic Saratoga chips, the Browns, 1940 authors of “America Cooks,” told you to slice potatoes “to fairylike thinness” and fry them in lard. A 1904 recipe from The Times called for frying them in olive oil, which gave the potatoes a nutty flavor, and, as we now know, was a lot healthier than many of today’s commercially used oils – or the once used lard.

Modern Day Potato Chips

Modern day potato chips come in a multitude of flavors: vinegar and salt, sour cream and onion, cool ranch, and barbecue.  Some are ribbed or ruffled and some aren’t, they are packaged in noisy foil bags, are plentifully salted, and sometimes are stamped out in identical sizes and stacked in a cardboard tube.  Don’t you wonder what they use to make those flavors?

An eight ounce bag of chips has 1242 calories, 766 of them from fat.  It contains 85.1 grams of fat (24.9 grams of which are saturated, 1192 mg of sodium (slightly more than half of the daily recommendation), and 14.9 grams of protein.

Pringles come all nice and neat and layered in a tube.  But, what happened to just potatoes?  Here’s Pringles’ ingredient list:  dried potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: corn oil, cottonseed oil, and/or sunflower oil), wheat starch, maltodextrin, rice flour, salt and dextrose.

A one ounce serving size of Lay’s classic potato chips is made from potatoes, sunflower and/or corn oil, and salt.  It has 150 calories, 10 grams of fat (1gram saturated), and 2 grams of protein.

Bottom Line:

Sometimes you gotta love the chips.  However, there are some good choices and some not so good choices.  Oven frying your own is probably the best choice – you get the vegetable lightly coated with olive oil and however much salt and herbs you prefer.

Some commercial brands now come oven baked, too.  If you are buying a bag of chips  look for the kind that is made from real potatoes rather than dried potatoes mixed with sugars, salt, and preservatives.

For home made oven fried potato chips, wash the potatoes well and slice them thinly, about 1/8-inch,  keeping the peel on. Brush both sides with olive oil (you can use a light coating of cooking spray if you are watching your calories) and arrange the slices on a baking sheet in a single layer without crowding. Sprinkle with salt and herbs, if desired. Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven until nicely browned and pretend you’re in Saratoga.

Oh, What One Meal Can Do To Your Arteries!

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Macaroni and Cheese

This Might Make You Think Twice

Wow!  A meal that is high in saturated fat can affect your arteries within hours!

An article on “Xtreme Eating” in The Nutrition Action Newsletter alarmingly gave stats on some of the highest-calorie restaurant dishes in the US, meals they called “nutritional trainwrecks.”

Picking up on that, ABC News did an experiment on what one of these types of meals would do to someone’s arteries.

What They Ate

A young reporter and her producer had their blood vessels tested before and after eating some of the food mentioned in Nutrition Action’s article.

For lunch they each had the deep-fried macaroni and cheese appetizer from The Cheesecake Factory, followed by a bacon cheeseburger wrapped in a quesadilla from Applebee’s, followed by Uno Chicago Grill’s giant cookie smothered in ice cream..

All  told:  6190 calories and 187 grams of saturated fat, more than 3 times the daily calories and 10 times the saturated fat recommended by the government.

What Happened After The Calorie And Fat Overload

In the lab two hours after their monster meals, repeat testing was done.  The results showed that the producer’s blood had turned into cloudy, yellowish, pus–like fluid – “you could literally see the fat that was now flooding the system,” according to one of the doctors.  The reporter’s arteries had narrowed so much that the ultrasound showed that her heart was pounding and working much, much harder to pump blood through her arteries.

Some Words To The Wise

Bottom Line: According to the lab Director at the University of Maryland Medical Center where the testing was done, each and every meal affects your arteries.

Pritikin Longevity Center’s nutritionist Dr. Jay Kenney says, “Just as each cigarette you smoke damages your lungs, so does each high–fat meal damage the inside “skin,” or endothelium, of your arteries. And while the crippling effects [lung cancer or cardiovascular disease] from each cigarette or fatty meal may not be apparent for many years, the daily assaults to our lungs and blood vessels can be measured – and last for several hours – every time we light up or eat a fatty meal.”

Rx: Apples And Some Broccoli

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A sample prescription

A Prescription For Veggies?

Yea for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the docs at three medical centers who are writing prescriptions for produce for families with weight problems.

Families with low incomes get coupons for produce that they can redeem at local farmers’ markets. The value of a coupon is $1 per person per day. It seems like a small amount, but with the coupons a family of four can get $120 of fresh produce  a month.

What’s The Rationale?

This objective is to get kids to increase their fruit and veggies by one serving a day.  It is also seen as a opportunity to introduce the children, who have a limited range of exposure, to real food.  The coupon is somewhat symbolic – the $1 coupon competes with the 99 cent fast food meals so familiar to these kids.

Obesity Has Tripled

According to the CDC, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the last 30 years.   Sedentary lifestyles and limited access to fresh, healthy food are seen as reasons for this rapid increase. Along with handing out the coupons, the doctors will follow the families receiving the coupons to determine how their eating patterns are affected.  They will also monitor health parameters like weight and body mass index (BMI).

The hope is, too, that the families become invested in good nutritional practices by hanging out with both the farmers and the consumers at the farmers’ market – and that they then develop a preference for shopping at these types of markets rather than fast food restaurants, supermarkets, big box and convenience stores.

Will It Help Farmers’ Markets, Too?

It may also help the farmers’ markets compete with the fast food vendors who entice kids and families with cheap calories and cheap meals.

The number of farmers’ markets has dramatically increased: from 1,755 in 1994 to more than 5,200.  Although US farmers’ markets generate over $1 billion in annual sales, they are low on the totem pole compared to the fast food industry which brought in over $22.79 billion in 2008.

Healthy Eating Patterns And Lifestyles

As the mayor of Boston said, “When I go to work in the morning, I see kids standing at the bus stop eating chips and drinking a soda.  I hope this will help them change their eating habits and lead to a healthier lifestyle.”

Eater Alert: Beware End Of Summer Gluttony

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It’s the week leading up to Labor Day weekend.  Not technically the end of summer, but it sure feels that way.

I don’t know about you, but for me the thought process seems to be:  “Oh heck, it’s the last week of summer, the holiday weekend is coming up, all of my family is going to be home, a lot of burgers, ice cream, picnic food – and then it’s nose to the grindstone” (even if it has been nose to the grindstone, as it has been for me, most of the summer).

Holidays And Vacations Often Mean Overeating

It’s the kind of holiday season mentality that starts around Thanksgiving and continues right through New Year’s Day when you swear you’ll never eat another carb again!

Or, it’s the “vacation” mentality, when all of your healthy eating promises become submerged in the deepest recesses of your brain.

Or, it’s the mentality that adds the “freshman 15 . . . or 5 . . . or 10,”  the freedom at last, away from home mentality where no food is off limits.

Four Weeks Of Overeating:  Changes That Last For Years

Some new research may make you think twice.  Amazingly, overeating for just four weeks can cause changes in body fat and weight that last for years. For four weeks people in a study limited their activity to 5,000 steps a day or less (considered a sedentary lifestyle) and increased their caloric intake by 70% (5000+ calories a day). For two years researchers periodically monitored body weight and composition in this group and compared it to another group that did not change its diet or physical activity.

How Much Weight Gain?

The overeater/under-exerciser group gained, on average, 14 pounds. Six months after they were allowed to go back to eating and exercising normally they lost, on average, 71 percent of the gained weight but only one-third of the group members had returned to within one pound of their initial weight.

After one year the overeaters were, on average,  3.3 pounds heavier than before their four week food fest. The normal eaters had no change in body weight.

The overeaters had more body fat and higher LDL (lousy) cholesterol levels one year after their four week binge.  After two and a half years, the overeaters averaged a gain of 6.8 pounds from when the study first started, but the normal eaters didn’t show any significant weight gain.

SocialDieter Tip:

Boy oh boy, the effects of gluttony are really hard to get rid of – even when those overeating habits are ditched for a healthy lifestyle.  Even short periods of overeating and under-exercising can have lasting effects and make it more difficult to lose weight and keep it off.  Keep that in mind around holiday time, vacations, and “let-down-your-hair” times leading up to holidays and vacations.  It’ll serve you well for years to come.

Red Berries Or Not?

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My husband loves his “red berry” cereal.  Not just any red berry cereal – but Special K Red Berries.  Plain old Special K, blueberry almond, or any other array of color and flavor just won’t do.

Red Berry Facts

The ingredients in Special K Red Berries :

Rice, Whole grain wheat, Sugar, Wheat bran, Freeze-dried strawberries, High fructose corn syrup, Soluble wheat fiber, Salt, Malt Flavoring, Ascorbic acid (vitamin C), Reduced iron, Alpha tocopherol, Niacinamide, Pyridoxine hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Thiamin hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin A palmitate, Folic acid, Vitamin B12

A one cup serving size has:

  • 110 calories (150 calories with ½ cup of fat free milk)
  • 0 grams of fat
  • 0 grams cholesterol
  • 190 mg sodium
  • 27 grams Total carbohydrate
  • 3 grams fiber
  • 2 grams protein

Good, Bad, Or Indifferent?

Over 50 years ago Kellogg produced Special K as an alternative to Corn Flakes.  It is often marketed as Kellogg’s cereal for weight loss because it is made from rice and wheat.

110 calories isn’t bad for a one cup serving of Red Berries.  Just remember that most of us eat more than one cup. At three grams of fiber (over 10% of the recommended daily value), the package can say:  “A good source of fiber.”

By weight, most of the cereal is rice (the first ingredient listed).  Whole grain wheat is second. The added fiber comes from the wheat bran and the soluble wheat fiber.  Sugar is the third ingredient, freeze dried strawberries the fifth, and  high corn fructose corn syrup the sixth.  The two sugars and the berries add up to nine grams of sugar in each cup – the equivalent of a little more than two teaspoons of sugar.  The sodium accounts for 8% of the recommended daily amount.

A Good Breakfast Choice?

How does the breakfast of red berry cereal with fortified skim milk stack up?

It’s all about choices. Eating nothing followed by black coffee and a bagel or pastry sometime during the morning ranks in the negative zone way below good. Having a breakfast that has some protein and fiber and not too much sugar gets the body and brain geared up for the day.

Even though there could be a superior breakfast choice, this is a lot better that the breakfast of a whole lot of nothingness that my husband ate when his only fuel was what was in the gas tank in the car followed by numerous cups of black coffee, no sugar, in his office.  My guess is that the coffee kept company with conference room bagels, snack room cake, and some snagged desktop candy.

In the ranking of good, better, and best – I’d have to give it a good minus.  Adding fresh fruit makes it a good choice.  A better choice would be mixing a cereal with more fiber and protein and less sugar with Special K Red Berries, topped with some fresh fruit.

SocialDieter Tip:

Look for breakfast cereals with:

  • Whole grains  like “whole wheat” or “wheat bran,” not just “wheat.”
  • At least 3 grams of protein per serving.
  • No less than a four-to-one total carbohydrate-to-sugar ratio. This means if the “total carbohydrate” line says 24 grams, the “sugars” should be 6 grams or less, indicating that most of the carbs come from the grain and fibers, not from added sugars.
  • Follow the “five and five” rule:  less than 5 grams of sugar and at least 5 grams of fiber.