Most people are not surprised to know that pretzels offer fewer calories per serving than potato chips. Even with today’s marketing of multigrain tortilla chips and baked potato chips, the pretzel still ends up being the lower calorie choice. Despite all the marketing, these types of snack foods don’t add any nutritional value to the diet. Let’s take a closer look at how big of a difference it can make if you choose pretzels over potato chips – take a look at the labels below.
When you choose pretzels over potato chips you save almost 50 calories per serving – this can really add up if you can’t stick with one serving. Chips have a high amount of fat at 10 grams per serving (equal to 15% of your fat for the day), compared to pretzels which have less than 1 gram of fat per serving. However, when it comes to sodium, pretzels don’t score so well. One serving of pretzels offers 384 mg of sodium compared to potato chips which are 180 mg per serving. As a reminder, the daily limit is 2400 mg per day.
While eating potato chips and pretzels you have to pay attention to the serving size – on the labels below, it’s just 1 ounce. Serving sizes vary depending on the type of pretzel or size of the chip. Snack foods are easy to overeat because you can eat them out of the bag. A tip for portion control is to pour what you want to eat into a bowl so you can monitor how much you are eating.
When deciding on your choice for a snack, remember it may be easier for you to control the portion of pretzels versus potato chips. So keep pretzels in the office or at home to snack on next time and remember to portion them out ahead of time. Of course, fruits and vegetables make better low calorie, high fiber snack choices so have them available as well.
Rebecca
