Usually I promote heavily the consumption of any low carb product, because they are by their nature low in sugar. However, you want to be sure you're eating nutritious things! I hesitate to recommend pork rinds for this reason.

Here's the thing. You can only eat X amount of food in a given day. Your body needs Y amount of nutrition. This means that pretty much anything you eat should give you a health benefit. You should eat tuna for fish oils, broccoli for fiber and nutrients, almonds for fiber and vitamin E, and so on. The human body has enough trouble as it is getting all the vitamins it needs each day without taking up some of your "stomach space" by putting in nutritionally vacant food.

Pork rinds were developed in the south during a time when food was very scarce. Pork rind is literally the tough, hard outer skin of the pig, cut up and deep fried in trans fatty acids. The fat makes it tasty - but there isn't much "health" in a pig skin. There are definite harmful aspects to deep frying anything in trans fatty acids.

As if the trans fatty acids weren't bad enough, pork rinds are also chock full of salt. You ingest literally five times the salt in a serving of pork rinds than you do in a serving of potato chips. That high volume of salt is not good for you. It can cause a wealth of medical issues.

Again, we're not talking about eating a healthy pork chop grilled gently with some herbs. We're talking about eating the thick pork skin which - in pre-poverty days - was probably used to make shoe leather or perhaps a chew-toy for the dog.

There are numerous healthy snacks that you could eat every day. These can include celery sticks, broccoli sticks, carrot sticks, celery slices with cheese slices on it, and much more. To deliberately take in a food that has no nutritional value - and has numerous harmful aspects to it - would not be in line with a healthy diet.

If it's the salt you crave, I would find a lower salt food to substitute, such as salted nuts.

Make the effort to wean yourself off of pork rinds. We all have childhood foods we grew up with - like Twinkies - that were simply not wise choices for our parents to feed us. As sane adults, we can make the choice to break those habits and embark on a new, more healthy way of eating.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books