A friend and I were having a lively debate about whether or not pork rinds were bad for you. We were shopping together in the grocery store to buy some snacks for a football game, when she desperately wanted to buy pork rinds. I knew that she was trying to stick to a healthy diet, but she claimed that they were a healthier snack. I decided that the only way to settle this fight was to look up the nutritional information on my iPhone.

I was thinking that pork rinds were bad because they were made from pig skin and deep fried. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty gross combination. As it turns out, I had to eat my words (and the pork rinds) because she was right. If you do eat a one ounce serving of pork rinds, they have zero carbohydrates and 17 g of protein. That is a much better ratio than you would be able to find in any bag of chips, and 43% of the fat in pork rinds is unsaturated. They also contain some of the healthy fats that are found in olive oil. I was pretty surprised to find out that pork rinds are a “healthy” junk food!