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Do you crave a big bucket of popcorn when you go to the movies? How about at home when you fire up your DVD player to watch a late-night flick with your sweetie?
As it turns out, popcorn is one of the healthiest snacks you can eat (far healthier than the much-touted edamame) and polyphenols are the reason why.
Polyphenols are a type of chemical found in plant foods that help neutralize free radicals, those nasty little baddies that damage your cells and contribute to rapid aging.
Popcorn has one of the highest levels of polyphenols of any plant food – including most fruit!
According to Joe Vinson, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton:
“Popcorn has more antioxidants in total than other snack foods that you can consume and it also has quite a bit of fiber.”
While the fiber aspect of popcorn is not particularly impressive to me as fiber is not necessarily a good thing in large quantities (people just need so much of it as they are typically so constipated from their lousy diets), the polyphenol aspect of the research is indeed compelling and should encourage folks to fire up that popcorn maker more often.
Don’t Buy Microwave or Processed Popcorn
As with any food, preparation and sourcing are critical, so don’t run out to the supermarket and load up on microwave popcorn after reading this post. It also would be wise to avoid popcorn at the movies as the synthetic factory fats and processed salt used to flavor the popcorn is less than ideal and overrides any benefit of the popcorn itself!
One other type of popcorn to skip: popcorn in snack bags specifically packaged for lunchboxes which are loaded with all manner of chemicals and synthetics for flavoring and coloring.
The healthiest popcorn is made yourself the old fashioned way on the stovetop. Popcorn makers are ok too, but in my experience, the stove is just as fast and easy with less cleanup. Popcorn is so cheap, most people will find that a nice big bag of organic kernels easily fits into even the tightest of food budgets.
The best oils to cook your popcorn in include homemade ghee or a quality brand of expeller-pressed coconut oil.
After popping, sprinkle with a good quality sea salt to complete your delicious and healthful snack. Some folks I know sprinkle with nutritional yeast powder for a nice boost of B vitamins.
Even though homemade popcorn is a fantastic and healthy snack choice, don’t overdo it. Corn that is not soaked or sprouted prior to cooking contains anti-nutrients that can inflame digestion if consumed to excess.
By the way, if someone in your family is allergic to corn, try popped sorghum. It looks and tastes the same, just smaller kernels.
How to Make Stovetop Popcorn (Video)
Below is a video I filmed for the Weston A. Price Foundation on Healthy Snacks. Click here for a transcript if you don’t prefer videos. The video includes a segment on making healthy popcorn. This visual can be helpful if you’ve never made it on the stovetop before. This is the healthiest way to enjoy it!
Organic, preferably heirloom corn kernels popped on the stovetop is a great snack to pack in your children’s lunchboxes. It is very affordable and you can feel good about making it!
Source: Study: The Snack Loaded with Antioxidants
I love popcorn, but has anyone else noticed that organic popcorn seems to have MUCH more hulls???
yes – way more, but I feel it’s a trade-off to the junk popcorn out there.
I’d rather snack on seaweed than gmo corn which is nutritionally void and a blood sugar disaster.
Oh, for the love of…Not all corn is GMO. There are heritage and organic corns that are easy to find. They have sustained the native peoples of 2 continents for centuries. Yeah, they really are devoid of nutrition! Please stop spreading this nonsense around.
corn is inflammatory so some people with those conditions won’t tolerate it can’t see how popcorn is “healthy” or useful really
Thank you so much for this post! I am new to Weston A. Price and trying to learn everything I possibly can.
Why are you do vulgar and angry about popcorn?
Love it here too! But wouldn’t a caution also be in order that eating it too much can contribute to anemia in some women?
Fuck you!! Its just a pop corn how can it be healthy??
Um, I think this comment needs to be deleted.
LOL!
Yes, it should be removed. I find it VERY offensive.
I agree.
This is a really offensive comment! It should be, “F*** you! It’s just popcorn, how can it be healthy?”
Poor grammar is always offensive. 😉
Ha! I couldn’t agree with you more! The poor sentence structure is what I found most offensive as well! 😉
That’s good to know, pure coincidence I eat popcorn today with a drizzling of nutritional yeast. Helps to hold off the hunger until dinner
Marian, the only “nutrient” in nutritional yeast is carbs (same as corn) which means more calories and more conversion to sugar.
There is no protein or vitamins as they advertise – They forget to tell us that when they deactivate the original yeast, which they do so by heating, they deactivate the proteins, and the b vitamins are molecularly damaged as well. Oliver
You obviously don’t know much about what you’re talking about.
I don’t see the “obvious” part. If you don’t know what I am talking about that doesn’t make me incorrect – nor does it make you stupid or ignorant. Chemically speaking, from a molecular perspective, I am absolutly correct.
All one has to do is look up what can damage a protein or what can damage a B vitamin or C or the molecule that is A. It will always come down to molecular damage when trying to figure out what is healthy – nothing else. No marketing, no hype, no happy pictures or commercials with kids eating empty cereal will convince me other wise – the truth is in the molecules which no one speaks about.
@Oliver, why are you here? you dispute everything Sarah says and are just over all negative person when it comes to anything said on this post…. I don’t understand……. Do you have your own website, blog, or FB page you can post your stuff on? Are you expertly trained like Sarah is?
I stove pop organic kernels I get from TJs that cost $2 a bag. Pop it in organic sunflower oil and top it with organic butter and Himalayan salt. Yum!
Funny that my monkeys have been begging for some the last couple of days. It is a rare treat because we eat a paleo diet. I love the air popper as well. Load up the cup on top with coconut oil, pop the popcorn, drizzle the nicely melted oil over top & salt, and the cleanup is a lot better than stovetop, too. I do have whirly-pop envy, though, as my parents have one and it is awesome.
Hi Amy
Did paleo folk use salt? What are the things paleo eat or is that just a name people use for a type of diet and has little to do with the actual period? Thanx Oliver
*Sigh* Yes, paleolithic peoples used salt. Salt (or, rather sodium–as it appears in different forms) is a vital nutrient. We would die without it. There would also have been no food for the winter months during the centuries of pre-industrialization without salt. Salt has been harvested for eons from natural salt deposits around the world or naturally evaporated from salt water.
There is no record of when salt was first “harvested”. salt is intergral to humans but it never had to be harvested or shaken onto meals until relativly recently (historically). No other species has to harvest their salt – it is already in many of the foods they eat naturally – fish for example.
Storing of food is also a recent phenomenom (historically). Many speak in centuries when referring to what man used to do or was unable to do. We have been on earth for seven million (depending on who you ask), and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 million years ago we didn’t “store” food. Yes there may have been an occaisional frozen beast still fully intact, but beyond that nothing was saved. This salt thing is very recent (historically). We were not meant to ‘add’ salt to our foods – something else no other species does – and no other species has health issues as direct result from sodium intake. Most species would die without their natural salt intake – now we humans are dying with it.
The whole paleo diet thing is possibly misleading anyhoo – that time period also didn’t have everything cooked. Oliver