It’s been a long time since we have stopped going into kitchen for getting snacks. Biscuits have now become the preferred choice to deal our hunger. But have we ever verified the effect of Biscuits on our health? Have we ever recognised that, some ingredients in biscuits are not only futile but are fatal!

Refined Wheat Flour:  Biscuit manufacturing companies act too smart to declare their main ingredient as `Refined Wheat Flour’... which is nothing but the Maida. Maida is made from the starchy part of wheat grain and does not contain any nutritional value. It’s bleached with some chemicals for softness and colour. And what’s worse! It does not contain any fibre that would let it digest. Maida is particularly harmful for people who suffer from diabetes. In one sentence Maida is treated as a poison by many nutritional experts. And that is the main ingredient for most of our biscuits. Some popular biscuits are made of more than 70% of Maida!

Hydrogenated oil:  Some people believe that the invention of Hydrogenated oils is one of the worst threats to our health. By adding hydrogen to cheap oils, manufacturers can alter the nature of oils to their requirements. Such hydrogenated oils are suspected to produce ‘Transfats’. Transfats are known to increase LDL (bad) cholesterol and decrease HDL (good) cholesterol... and thereby affects the health of our heart.

Partially hydrogenated oils might be more dangerous than fully hydrogenated oils! But most of the manufacturers don’t care to mention such division. So it would be better to prefer biscuits which are manufactured with ‘Edible Vegetable oils’ or at least those which declare ‘No Transfats’.

Emulsifiers:  People overlook the word Emulsifiers on the list of ingredients as if they mean nothing! Emulsifiers are those substances that keep different substances together. Some of them might be natural, but most of them are chemical!!! Few of them might even contain traces of animal fats. For example emulsifier ‘472e ‘can either be derived from plants or from animal fats... and we don’t have the choice except to rely on the green ‘Vegetarian’ circle stamped by the manufacturer. And that is not the end of the problem. Scientists have found some adverse affects of artificial emulsifiers while experimenting on mice! And these experiments can soon wide open our eyes, which are often closed while browsing through the list of ingredients.

Salt and Sugar: We have already stuffed our intake with outrageous proportions of salt and sugar. And we are going for biscuits that either salty or creamy. With all the taste and process with which a biscuit is made, it’s hard to find out the actual proportion of salt and sugar hidden in them. And we end up consuming too much of the white poisons in the disguise of cookies.

Well it’s not the end of the list of harmful ingredients involved in Biscuits. Even those companies that boast of healthy biscuits won’t have much stuff in them except the word ‘TRACES of NUTS’ or ‘TRACES OF VITAMINS AND MINERALS’. We all know that TRACES is a tricky word. And we haven’t gone into the subject of Artificial Flavours and Colours!

- Nirjara.