How to find out if your snacks are healthy

As people adjust their lifestyles, one crucial factor to consider is how we fuel our bodies. Many supermarket options are full of questionable ingredients—from extra sugars to get you hooked to specially formulated ratios to stop you from feeling full and stop eating.

No one should have to be manipulated into eating a snack, so let’s take some time to consider what we need to search out to make sure we are eating healthy, including organic snacks that not only taste great — but are good for you too.

Sugar

We all know that person who seems super sweet at first, but it’s all a front. Processed sugar is like that person. Sugar gives us a bit of sweetness in exchange for empty calories, causing tooth decay, heart disease, and weight gain.

Extra sugar can also cause your blood glucose to spike up and down, leaving you feeling irritable and gross throughout the day. Studies have also shown that too much sugar can bind with proteins within your body, making your skin lose its elasticity and make you age faster. What’s worse is that sugars feed yeast and bacteria within your body, bolstering these invaders and giving them an edge over your immune system.

No preservatives

Preservatives are frequently synthetic or filler ingredients designed to control the rate at which food undergoes the natural process of breaking down or spoiling while sitting on the grocery store shelf. This means less turnaround of inventory as they can wait longer, boosting profitability. However, that means more high fructose corn syrup, sodium nitrate and nitrite, and trans fats.

Some preservatives like citric acid can be naturally based and protect the fruit from enzymatic breakdown — getting brown and mushy — and can be okay in moderation. But as more research comes out, it has been found that sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite have been linked to cancer, as well as potassium bromate.

High fructose corn syrup is used as both a preservative and sweetener as above with sugars, but it has also been shown to increase bad cholesterol, insulin resistance, and weight gain. These are significant factors to heart disease and more.

While many of these ingredients have been banned in Europe and Canada, they are still frequently found on American markets’ shelves.

Rich in protein and fiber

Protein and fiber are abundant in natural and healthy ingredients. Together they provide fuel and energy for your body while helping you feel full and satisfied from what you’ve just eaten.

A healthy snack will favor its protein over oils and sugars to make sure you feel appropriately full from what you’re eating. Conversely, the oily snacks will act on an almost addictive impulse by blocking signals that tell you that you’re full. It’s a very elaborate way of making sure you need to eat more of their product to reach satisfaction and stop eating rather than just making sure your body gets enough of what it requires.

What they do for the world

Your health isn’t limited to what you put in your body — it’s also defined by what environment you place it in. Any company can throw their product in a colorful box that evokes green fields and organic goodness — but what do they stand for as a whole?

Knowing that a company strives to improve the world through ethical practices and efforts such as renewable and organic ingredients and making their packaging with recycled and recyclable materials shows that they are making a sincere effort to improve the world. If they perform actions for equitable change and improvement in the world, that philosophy would indeed be translated into their products.