Cookies, digestive biscuits, soda crackers, sandwich biscuits... The supermarket shelves are filled with a wide variety of biscuits in all sorts of flavors and types, occupying two or three shelves completely. Faced with so many different kinds of biscuits, do you know how to choose the healthiest ones?
First, let's see what biscuits are actually made of.
1. Flour. To make biscuits particularly crispy, the key is to choose "cake flour," which is wheat flour with a relatively low protein content. Therefore, biscuits are low-protein foods, and their protein content is not as high as that of steamed buns.
2. Fats. Among the fats used in biscuit making, ordinary vegetable oil is relatively better; animal fats like tallow, lard, and butter have higher saturated fat content and lower nutritional value; and "shortening," "vegetable cream," and "hydrogenated vegetable oil," which contain trans fatty acids, are the most unhealthy.
3. Sugar. Whether it's white sugar, glucose syrup, or maltose syrup, "starch syrup," or "corn syrup," these are all simple sugars that contain energy, and their health effects are the same. Be wary of some companies that replace white sugar with other syrups and then claim their products are "sugar-free."
4. Other ingredients. The various flavors of biscuits basically come from flavorings and colorings. The richer and more novel the flavor, the more unhealthy the biscuit might be. For the sake of convenience and to reduce costs, chocolate biscuits often use mock chocolate made from cocoa butter substitutes, which often contain trans fatty acids.
Leavening agents are a necessary ingredient in many biscuits. They make biscuit products crispy and delicious, with wafers and soda crackers being prime examples. Leavening agents may contain aluminum, and excessive consumption can promote the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
Therefore, the key to choosing the healthiest biscuits is to select those with a light flavor and low fat content. Whether the flavor is light is something you can tell with one bite, but choosing a low-fat variety is a bit more difficult.
The simplest way is to choose biscuits with low crispness, meaning the harder ones, such as the "animal crackers" or "calcium milk biscuits" we used to eat often. Alternatively, wrap a biscuit in a white paper towel, place a heavy object on top, and after 20 minutes, check how much grease is on the paper. The more grease on the paper, the higher the fat content. In general, biscuits containing vegetables, with a light salty and sweet taste, and low fat content are healthier.