Multigrain Tortilla Chips Review - Food Should Taste Good

It’s not easy to stay faithful to your diet over the long term. We become tired of limiting ourselves, and too often, we get comfortable with a routine of similar foods day in and day out. Why does this happen? Simply, because dieting isn’t easy. It’s hard to find “healthy foods” that work for your dietary restrictions, so a common shortcut that we take is to stick to the same kinds of “safe foods” most days.

I find that this habit is doomed to failure. Boredom, frustration, and constant cravings will become unbearable, and I end up gorging on "cheat foods." One cheat meal leads to another, and before I know it, a whole day of healthy eating is destroyed. I've even watched these mistakes pile up until eventually I realize that I've lapsed back in to eating junk or fast food all the time!

One way I've tried to stop this is to introduce variety into my daily meals. And when looking for new foods to add, I always start with snack foods.  The particular brand of chips I'm into right now is made by a company called Food Should Taste Good (FSTG from here on out). Specifically, I'm a big fan of their Multigrain Tortilla Chips. But don’t let the name mislead you!: these tortillas are unlike any others I've ever tasted.

These chips are different because FSTG has come up with a whole new meaning of the phrase "multigrain" (it's only ever been a marketing term, anyways). You'll see that they've added some interesting ingredients like flax, sunflower and sesame seeds, oat fiber, brown rice flour, quinoa, and soy. Most other brands would have just gone with a corn ingredient and kept it at that. But most other brands don't taste as good!

The Best Tortilla Chips on the Planet?

These chips are almost perfectly flat. If you look closely, you can very clearly see the individual nuts and seeds that are embedded in the tortillas. And no artificial colors or flavors have been added here. Literally, what you see is what you get. 

Pop one into your mouth and the first thing you'll notice is the just-right saltiness of the chit. For such a low amount of sodium per serving, the salty flavor is a pleasant surprise. You'll also notice as you dig into the bag that some chips are saltier than others.

Biting into the chip, you get a delightful crunch that is characteristic of the thickness of these chips, especially from the extra nuts and seeds that are cooked into them. FSTG has really succeeded in making their Multigrain Chips stick out from the rest of the brands out there. Each chip is packed with a nutty flavor that goes great with a dip like hummus. My roommate thinks they taste kinda like Sun Chips Garden Harvest, which I kinda agree with, but I think there’s only a slight similarity.

What I like most about the taste is that it's so different from what I'm used to that I don't get bored with it. Maybe I'm just not cultured enough yet. But when I eat these I feel like I want to slow down and savor them.

That's Great, but are they Good for You?

In terms of nutrition, these chips actually have a lot to offer. If you're careful to eat them in moderation, they won’t crash your diet (just remember to keep an eye on those calories). The problem is, like most great snacks, it's hard to know when to stop! That's why I usually buy them in the single serving, 1.5 oz bag.

Compared to other brands, FSTG Multigrain Tortilla Chips have one or two extra grams of fiber and fewer calories per serving (FSTG: 210 calories per 1.5 oz; Tostitos Multigrain: 225 calories per 1.5 oz). But they do have more total fat per serving (10 grams vs. 6), which comes from some ingredients you don't typically see in other chips, like flax, sunflower and sesame seeds.

Turn over the packaging and you’ll notice that this company either really cares about your health, or they have a huge affinity for bragging about the benefits of eating their chips. Maybe both. There are a total of eleven health "badges" arranged in four rows (why couldn't they find just one more badge to put in there and make it a perfect grid?). It looks like they've included everything they could think of, like “low sodium,” “gluten free,” “certified vegan,” “certified kosher,” and so on.

I think we should actually be cautious that so many health labels are stamped on the bag. To quote Dr. Agus in A Short Guide:

"If a food product has to tell you that it's good for you, then it's probably not very real. In order for claims to be made, the food must be packaged somehow and pass some sort of test for the seal of approval. This means that the food cannot possibly be as close to nature as possible."

Caveat aside, I think the important takeaway is that we have to be careful not to let these "health badges" lead us into thinking this is a miracle snack. It's not.

For example, consider the “good source of fiber” claim. Sure, three grams per serving is better than most chips, but it's not as good as what you’d get from a vegetable. And while it's important for those with gluten allergies to know that this is a gluten free food, you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking this product can help you lose weight. Come to think of it, I could probably write an objection to most of the health claims on this packaging, but you get the point.

Verdict

Things I Love:

• Great taste - unlike any other tortilla chip 
• Great for dipping 
• You can almost see every ingredient in each chip 
• No artificial ingredients 
• No vague "natural flavor" additives 
• Lots of whole grains. Over half the recommended daily amount
• Made with ingredients you can actually pronounce 
• More fiber than most chips
• Low saturated fat

Things to be cautious about:

• Like many tortilla chips, they're fried in oil. Not baked.
• Few micro-nutrients. These chips won't do much more than satisfy a craving. Despite the great list of ingredients, it's not a miracle food.

Bottom line: 

I think these chips are awesome. There's no perfect snack, but these come close. You can order them online at Amazon or look for them in supermarkets like Wegman's.

The Sad Truth about Campbell's V8 Juice

It's important to step back from your daily routine once in a while and consider where your nutrition is coming from. One of the most important questions I ask myself when I do a mental checklist like this is: how many fruits and vegetables have I been eating lately? (The answer: never enough). If I had to guess, I would say that most people probably aren't getting enough, either1. Let’s face it: the obese didn't become overweight while eating salads for lunch and fruit for breakfast.

Yet, the big news in nutrition circles this week has been all about a new study2, which found that by choosing 7 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, you can reduce your risk of dying at any time by 42 percent. So in the face of such news, you may start looking for easy ways to increase your vegetable consumption.

Because the truth is, even among the health-conscious, many of us are getting too little fiber and nutrients from whole foods, and turning instead to supplements like "One-a-Day" Vitamin pills. But this type of band-aid nutrition just doesn't isn't the same as the real thing. As the cancer expert Dr. Agus writes in his book, A Short Guide to a Long Life, “The interactions of supplements and the body are very complex [...] We cannot expect a pill or packaged food product to satisfy our nutritional needs in the same way real food can.”3

Veggie drinks like V8 Juice will tell you they're here to help. In fact, V8 brags right on the label that it contains two full servings of veggies in each can. Does this translate to great benefits for your health? And if so, should you drink V8 every day?

Is V8 Really Good for You?

2 servings of veggies in each can:
 is this too good to be true?

First, let’s look at the ingredients in the low-sodium V8. The first things on the label are water and a vegetable juice blend: “Reconstituted juices of tomatoes, carrots, celery, beets, parsley, lettuce, watercress, and spinach.” You can't figure this out from the can itself, but the vegetable content is actually around 87% tomato juice. They choose tomatoes as the base for because tomatoes have a good flavor that most of us find pleasant, and also a high water content. So the first thing to notice is that although a can of V8 is designed to look like it contains a ton of different of veggies, the truth is that you’re actually getting about the same vegetable content as a can of tomato soup or spaghetti sauce with some added bonuses.

What does "Reconstituted" Mean?

But what about that strange word, reconstituted, that describes the veggie blend? Campbell’s Soup Company offers little detailed information about how they make V8 juice4, so we can only take an educated guess about what they might mean by “reconstituted.”

Since V8 is packaged in a variety of containers - they offer several sizes of cans and plastic bottles - concentrating the juices will make it easier and less expensive to transport the product between their manufacturing and bottling facilities, which could be separated by many miles. The juice may also be flash frozen and stored for a time (which would be easier in a concentrated state) before it's ready to be packaged and sent to stores. Then, before bottling the V8 Juice, Campbell’s adds water back into the concentrate, which is called “reconstituting.”

What happens to Vegetables during the Juicing Process?

A glass of V8 Juice, pictured here on my kitchen table

The most critical part of making V8 Juice involves taking whole vegetables and turning them into a drinkable form, a process known as juicing. Juicing vegetables comes with a major drawback, though. Unless Campbell’s uses a special processing facility that prevents oxygen from coming into contact with the blended vegetables, many plant nutrients and naturally occurring vitamins in the vegetables will be oxidized and rendered useless. As Dr. Agus explains in A Short Guide: “As soon as we expose the inner flesh of a fruit or vegetable to the oxygen-rich air, we oxidize it on the spot - especially if we subject the fruit or vegetable to the disruptive power of a blender. We change its whole makeup and the nutrition that went with it.”5

So despite the claim that V8 Juice contains two full servings of vegetables per can, it turns out that not all servings are made equal. The servings of vegetables in V8 Juice contain far fewer naturally-occurring vitamins and phytonutrients than whole, unblended vegetables.

Effects of Irradiation and Pasteurization

Just like milk and many other beverages you can find at the supermarket, V8 Juice is pasteurized. Pasteurization is necessary for food safety reasons, but just like the process of juicing, pasteurizing is also not without drawbacks6. Just like how bacteria and other harmful organic compounds are destroyed by the high heat of pasteurization, so too are many delicate vitamins and phytochemicals.

There are a couple of different types of pasteurization, and Campbell’s doesn't specify which kind it uses in manufacturing V8 Juice. But we know that one step in the process is to irradiate the juices with Gamma Rays to remove harmful parasites, insect larvae, and other pathogens. Irradiation is known destroy vitamins A, B12, D and E.7

What are the implications? While you can certainly feel safe as you sip on your V8, the downside is that the nutritional profile of your drink is nothing like what you would get if you took the same ingredients from your own garden or local farmer’s market and made your own V8 Juice at home.

Added Ingredients and Antioxidants in V8

Low Sodium V8 Juice Nutrition Facts

In order to replace some of the nutrients that are lost during pasteurization, Campbell’s has to add them back during one of the final steps of its process. Turning again to the ingredients label, we can see that “Potassium Chloride, Magnesium, Salt, Natural Flavoring, Vitamin C, and Citric Acid” add up to around 2% of your V8 Juice.

In my opinion, when you think about all the processing that the juices go through, plus these added ingredients, V8 seems more like a dietary supplement than a real food. While some of the additives, like salt, are likely added to preserve freshness, others are there just to boost the percentages of nutrients that are listed on the nutrition facts label. This is the same tactic that packaged foods have been using to mislead consumers for years. The philosophy in this marketing strategy is simple: food manufacturers show off how “healthy” their product is by listing high percentages of vitamins on the nutrition facts, and consumers are more likely to buy such products because of the supposed health benefits.

I don't have the qualifications to make a verdict on this, but we only have to turn back to Dr. Agus’s chapter on supplements in A Short Guide to reveal the true nature of such a practice: “The body likes to create free radicals to attack “bad” cells, including cancerous ones. If you block this mechanism by taking copious amounts of vitamins, especially those touted as antioxidants, [...] you block a physiological process. You disrupt a system we don’t fully understand yet.”8

An 11.5 oz can of V8 contains 180% of your daily value of Vitamin C, one of the most commonly advocated antioxidants on packaged foods. Just ask yourself: if you are consuming this much Vitamin C from one can of V8, then how much is your total intake among all the foods you eat in a day? How much disruption might you be causing to your body’s natural defense mechanisms by self-medicating in this way?

The Verdict on V8 Juice

If you are looking for an easy way to boost your daily intake of vegetables, then V8 is not the way to go. You will probably be fine with drinking it on occasion, on those days when you’re busy or on the go and you don’t have time to fuss around with homemade meals. But don’t fool yourself: There are far better alternatives. One large salad a day made from locally grown vegetables and some fresh fruit during breakfast might be the only changes you need to bring your fruit and vegetable consumption up to par. But don’t turn to store-bought alternatives.

The easiest and quickest solutions are rarely the best ones.

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Notes and References

1. We live in a time when obesity prevalence in the US has risen to over a third of adults and 17% of youth. See: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1832542
2. University College London. "New evidence linking fruit and vegetable consumption with lower mortality." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 31 March 2014. Accessed 06 April 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140331194030.htm>.
3. Agus, David. "Vitamins and Supplements." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 154-55. Print.
4. I reached out to Campbell's to comment on this article, so I’ll update this post in the future if they reply to me.
5. Agus, David. "Juicing." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 150-51. Print.
6. The effects of Pasteurization are well known in dairy products. A 2011 meta-analysis of 40 studies published in the Journal of Food Protection found that “Vitamins B12 and E decreased following pasteurization, and vitamin A increased. Random effects meta-analysis revealed no significant effect of pasteurization on vitamin B6 concentrations.” See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22054181
7. Dubois, Sirah. "Does Pasteurization Affect the Nutrients in Fruit?" Woman. N.p., n.d. Web. Accessed 06 Apr. 2014. <http://woman.thenest.com/pasteurization-affect-nutrients-fruit-9199.html>.
8. Agus, David. "Vitamins and Supplements." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 155. Print.
9. This post may contain affiliate links. See my note on affiliate links and my promise of opinion integrity here (bottom of page).

Book Recommendation: A Short Guide to a Long Life

Today, I have decided to write my first blog post not about food, but about a book.

“Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. My work in the cancer war has taught me a lot about all things health-related, much of which goes against conventional wisdom.” - Dr. David Agus, M.D.

Written in 2014 by the preeminent expert on Cancer recovery and biomedical research, Dr. David Agus, A Short Guide to a Long Life contains a trove of information that is going to be critical to the substantiation of many claims I plan to make in this blog. As its title suggests, the book is intended to serve as a blueprint for what you need to do to be healthy throughout your time on this earth.

Dr. Agus draws from the following qualifications:

• 20 years of experience working with a variety of cancer patients
• Professor of medicine at the University of Southern California
• Cofounder of two innovative companies specializing in personalized medicine
• Author of The End of Illness, 2012
• CBS News contributor

For the above reasons, I have chosen to focus on Dr. Agus’s work when making my recommendations during food reviews and recipe creations/commentaries. You will often see me reference specific sections of his book, A Short Guide to a Long Life, which has been featured in Wired Magazine and which I encourage you to buy for your own reading.

The book is easily accessible to the layperson, because each chapter is typically shorter than 5 pages long, and written with language that a non-expert can understand. Dr. Agus saves the technical details for his earlier work, The End of Illness, and chooses instead to focus on getting straight to the point with his advice in A Short Guide.

This is a book that you will easily get through in under a day, but which you will want to keep close at hand for many years to come. Dr. Agus breaks his advice into four easy to digest sections: “The Power of Prevention,” “What to Do,” “What to Avoid,” and “Doctor’s Orders.” Each of these sections contains a variety of information relating to which foods to eat (and which to avoid), how to optimize your sleeping habits, how to care for your physical fitness, and more. I highly recommend you check it out.

A Short Guide to a Long Life can be purchased from Amazon. You may also listen to an excerpt of the audiobook version on Dr. Agus’s website.

You may also be interested in Dr. Agus’s other book, The End of Illness, available at Amazon.

What's a Panacea?

If you go to Google and type in "define panacea," it will serve up the following:

Pan - a - ce - a

noun

     1. a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases.

I first learned the word in my high school English class. At the time, it didn't inspire me very much. Situated on my vocab list between other "big words" like ameliorate, animosity, conflagration, hors d'oeuvre, and trepidation; panacea didn't exactly stick out.

But lately I have been feeling kinda shitty. I'm slightly overweight, lazy, and dealing with the creeping anxiety of leaving Penn State as my graduation date gets closer and closer. So I've realized I'm at a time in my life when a panacea would really be kinda great. I've already tried a bevy of prescription medications that were designed to combat my lifelong anxiety and depressive tendencies, and I was met with disappointment and frustrating side effects.  I found myself increasingly self-medicating with food and alcohol, which only led to increased overeating of unhealthy garbage.

I think it's time for me to make a change. Perhaps you're ready for a change in your own life, too.

For many of us, a common source of comfort during difficult times has always been food. The problem is, we too often turn to the worst things for us, like junk food and fast food, when what we really need are fresh fruits and vegetables and home cooked meals. So the point of this blog is to try and find a way to make good food taste good. That's my goal, because I have always found that when I try to eat healthy, I inevitably fail after I  become fed up with boring-tasting food. So now I'm on a mission combat that problem. 

My general plan for this blog is to post about a variety of food-related topics, complete with detailed recipes and nutritional analyses, where appropriate. Sometimes I will post about a packaged food that you can buy at the store, and I'll comment with my thoughts about its healthiness, tastiness, and so on (see my recent post about Low Sodium V8 Juice). Other times I will share my own food creations with step-by-step instructions and colorful pictures. And finally, I hope to eventually create a YouTube channel with fun video demonstrations about how to make great food.

I want to find a way to lose weight while enjoying the food that I put into my body. Maybe along the way we can both learn something. Together, let's find out what we can accomplish!

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A note on affiliate links:

I use Amazon referral links in this blog when I link to a product. These links earn me money if you click through them and buy something, by funneling a small percentage of the purchase price to me. While I'm a little cautious about including these affiliate links in my blog, I really don't see a choice for now. I'm a college student who will be moving to New York City in a few months, and I need to save money. 

My pledge to you, dear reader, is this: I will do my best to prevent affiliate link bias from creeping into my opinions here. I'm committed to preserving the integrity of my writing, and to building a relationship of trust with my readers. That's why I'm building referral links into all my posts right from the start, and I will always be transparent about doing so.

If you suspect that my posts have been negatively affected through the use of referral links, please email me at philipdavis501@gmail.com so we can have a constructive conversation about the problem.