@steephie - Make enough up for a week and put them in the fridge. I assume you have microwave ovens and can warm them up.

But if you want quick with no advanced preparation, whole wheat crackers (Wheat Thins has a 100% whole wheat version now that is quite healthy and yummy) and cheese slices or peanut butter. Apple wedges with peanut butter to dip is also pretty good, although I have to be careful of the fructose in apples.

Rice Cakes are as easy to eat as crisps and don't taste too much like Styrofoam if you close your eyes tight and use your imagination.

@krellin - one from food network that sounds good. Made with canola and olive oils.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tylers-ultimate/kettle-chips-with-parmesan-and-herbs-recipe/index.html

Quaker makes some good flavored rice cakes now and they have somehow managed to keep the carbs down as well.

h ye...rice cakes...sprinkle with a wee bit 'o sawdust for roughage and you are well on your way to a healthy meal, I dare say!

krellin - You should try the new Quaker Oats rice cakes or their fiber crisps or popped rice snacks and crisps.

@Draugnar: am I at risk if I basically had it checked out on my own (and my parents') incentive?

It was more like:
'Should I check my cholesterol because my grandmother and mother had problems with it?'

'Uhm... Yeah, sure, that can't hurt.'

Not sure if that counts? I haven't heard anything about eating unhealthy or needing to eat healthier. The only higher-risk group I know I'm in is because I have astma which I have pretty much trained hard with on my own initiative so I barely notice I have it (my legs hurt way before my lungs, due to an unfortunate accident I explained before). I doubt that could be related.

So does that still make me "at risk" in the crips-context?

"At risk" can just mean you have a genetic predisposition to a condition. It doesn't means you have the condition or are showing early warning signs.

Chips are designed to be addictive and unsatisfying so that mass quantities can be eaten (resulting in higher margins for the chip makers).

So yeah, they're generally not the greatest thing. A bag of chips in itself isn't especially deadly though, just the fact that chips are ubiquitous as "snacks" that, contrary to what many probably expect, do basically nothing for satiety.

The thin chip, and puffs are especially guilty of this, trick the brain with its large surface area into thinking it is about to consume a mouthful of food, but when chewed up it becomes a small amount so that when swallowed the brain thinks of it as having not really even any food.

Hence satiety never really comes on from chips. Satiety is in large part neurological and not physical. Certain foods "trick" the brain, and chips are well known to be one of those foods. The chip makers, of course, know this, and exploit it to their benefit.

If you've never heard of any of this, this is good reading to get you going:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fmagazine%2Findex.jsonp&pagewanted=all&_r=0

@Thucy - without going into detail, I know that crisps are not designed in the way you describe.

And the manufacturers would much rather you bought small bags than big ones in terms of margin

I feel I must object strongly to the notion that British chips are equivalent to US fires. Fries are rather skinny, miserable things, smaller in girth than a pencil. A chip, on the other hand, is art in food form. A huge variety of shapes and sizes and a glorious taste. When done well they are on a par with the king of potato products, the roastie.

Crisps are generally the poor cousin of the potato world... with the exception on Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard flavour which kick arse :p

"Fries are rather skinny, miserable things, smaller in girth than a pencil. A chip, on the other hand, is art in food form. A huge variety of shapes and sizes and a glorious taste. "

There's a huge variety of fries too, Octavious. Not all are like the McDonald's fry. You clearly haven't spent much time on the road in US diners.

I have spent no time on the road in US diners. The McDonald's fry is a particularly poor one, but in the UK at least it's something akin to that you will get if you see fries on the menu. It makes life nice and easy. See fries, go elsewhere.

@Oct - you describe one narrow type of fry. Try steak fries and wedges. They are more akin to what you are used to. You are just used to seeing shoestring fries in US diners and they do dominate the diner and fastfood scene, but not the restaurant scene as a whole which are a totally different animal from crinkle cut or steak.

I make my crisps in olive oil :-)

Fries from McDonald's are just bastardized midget copies of bistro fries. They only serve as a medium for transporting salt and sauce to the consumer's digestive tract. Steak fries are superior if you actually care for the potato taste in your fry.

We actually call potato wedges "American potatoes" in Czech :)

So, care to go into detail Pete U?

Maybe refute some of the experts quoted in the article I linked, if you can?

The more chips you eat the more money Frito Lay makes, same goes for Coca Cola and ounces of shit.

The goal of the makers of junk food is to get you to want to eat it and crave it. This should not be shocking. But it is disturbing when you think about the addictive properties of certain kinds of foods like sugar, coupled with predatory advertising targeting irrational children. Grim stuff.

Anyone remember Walker's "Cajun Squirrel"?

My favorite is waffle fries. Crinkle cut with one side cut 90 degrees from the other and just close enough to leave small holes so the potato gets cooked all the way through.

The best related potato products I have ever eaten (thus leaving out scalloped potatoes with a cheesy, creamy sauce) are fries that my "Greek mom" used to make every single day. She would take her time, peel some potatoes, cut them by hand into medium-sized fries (quite a bit larger than MacDonald's but smaller than most 'home fries' at U.S. diners), and fry them in olive oil in a frying pan until they were cooked perfectly. I lived on those fries, Greek salads (more olive oil), apples, and souvlaki most days and was the healthiest I've ever been before or since.

Souvlaki and spanakopita and gyros (with lots of tzatziki on them) and kreatopita and baklava and keftedakia and kebabs and schwarma and hummus... I love Greek and Turkish foods!

@Thucy - given that I work in that industry, and specifically in R&D on product development, I can be very sure that a lot of the interpretations of things in the article are flat out wrong. I could go into much more detail, but I really can't.

"I feel I must object strongly to the notion that British chips are equivalent to US fires. Fries are rather skinny, miserable things, smaller in girth than a pencil. A chip, on the other hand, is art in food form. A huge variety of shapes and sizes and a glorious taste. When done well they are on a par with the king of potato products, the roastie.

Crisps are generally the poor cousin of the potato world... with the exception on Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard flavour which kick arse :p"

@Octavious: you are clearly talking about British fries. Chips are simply called fries in the US. British fries are called fries too in the US.

I'm sure you'll get over it :)

You could but you can't? Non-disclosure agreement? Care to talk about it over PM instead? Genuinely interested in your information and perspective.

Thucy - part of what Pete refers to is the difference between "margin" and "profit". Argue semantics if you like - but I think you're talking profit dollars, but you are using words that Pete understands as "margin", as in percentage.

To generalise... more chips consumed => more profit dollars. Smaller packets consumed => more margin as manufacturers generally accept lower _margin_ on larger packs.
Generally.
Depending on mix.
And marginal cost to produce & deliver
And the state of a thousand other things that take a piece of sell-price before it becomes operating income or EBIT

What about Corn chips (aka Doritos), being a college student who lives by himself I have a fairly typical college diet:
Lots of Pizza, McDonalds, Microwavable food and the largest part of my diet; Chips.

Doritos is my favourite snack and I probably have somewhere between 8-10 of them a week (and even more during examinations where I can read a textbook while having handfuls of the stuff).

Are corn chips just as bad for you as potato chips, or by some miracle is my unhealthy snack more healthy then I thought?

Corn Chips, such as Tortilla chips, aren't quite as bad as potato chips. Doritos are fucking terrible for you.

But they taste soooooooooooooooooooooo good... lol

Yeah, it's because they're made out of magical taste chemicals instead of real food.