Crunchy snacks are the hardest category to buy on this diet. Crunchy paleo snacks are harder to find than paleo friendly snacks in general, because most of what makes a packaged snack crunchy is a starch. Crisp texture in the snack aisle usually comes from a dough made with corn, rice, chickpea or lentil flour, and all four are off a paleo plate. Take the flour away and you have to get the crunch from somewhere else. There are five ways to do that, and each produces a different texture. This is a review of the crunchy categories that clear a paleo diet, sorted by what the crunch actually feels like rather than by brand. Where Crunch Comes From When...
Paleo snacks worth buying share one trait: the ingredient list is short enough to read on the shelf, and nothing on it is a grain, a legume, a dairy solid or a refined sugar. That rules out most of the packaged aisle. What is left is a smaller set of categories that hold up, plus a handful of formats that are portioned before you open them. This is a buying guide rather than a recipe post. Every category below is one you can pick up already made, and the checks at the end are the ones worth running on any bag before it goes in the cart. What Paleo Has to Mean Before You Pay for It The paleo diet...
A packaged snack is paleo if every line on the ingredient list comes from a food group the diet allows: meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, and the fats pressed from them. It stops being paleo the moment the list contains a grain, a legume, dairy, refined sugar, or, for a large share of paleo shoppers, a refined seed oil. That one filter clears most of the snack aisle. Chips are corn or potato. Crackers are wheat or rice flour. Bars are often bound with soy protein, whey or oats. Trail mix often leads with peanuts, which are a legume. What survives is a shorter list than the shelf suggests, and it is a real one: meat snacks, nuts...
A label-first guide to store-bought packaged snacks. Covers ingredient order, which oil, added sugars, sodium as a percent Daily Value, and the FDA serving-size rules that decide what a Nutrition Facts panel is actually reporting, then applies the same test across eight packaged snack formats.
Makhana is not a lotus seed. Makhana comes from Euryale ferox, a prickly water lily in the family Nymphaeaceae; lotus seed comes from Nelumbo nucifera in the family Nelumbonaceae. A botanical, agricultural and culinary comparison of two plants that are constantly confused, checked against primary sources.
