Remember the age-old advice to avoid eating between meals? Well, apparently not too many people are listening.
Snacking between meals in the U.S counts for one-quarter of daily calories. Whether it’s a bag of chips, a chunk of cheese or a banana, the habit of consistently grabbing a bite on the go has changed the typical three meals a day eating pattern into an all-day grazing affair.
Americans are consuming more calories than decades ago and snack twice as often. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal the majority of those additional calories are being consumed between meals. But is the act of snacking to blame for troubling trends in obesity rates? Nutrition researchers are still unsure.
During a recent trip to Europe, while others were sightseeing I was watching eating behaviors. (That’s what it’s like to travel with a registered dietitian.)
While American tourists were grabbing flaky croissants to nosh on while touring an open-air Parisian market, a French mother and her kids were sharing an apple. Instead of a cheese and cracker platter often traditional in the U.S., a pre-dinner drink in Venice is served with a trio of tiny bites including potato chips, olives and nuts. A mid-afternoon refresher of Italian lemon gelato in Capri is served in what we’d call the child’s size cup.
“It may be that meal and snack quality is more important than frequency of eating,” said registered dietitian Jill Weisenberger, author of “The Overworked Person’s Guide to Better Nutrition.”
Weisenberger recently wrote about the science of snacking in Food & Nutrition Magazine, a publication of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “The best pattern may be the one most suitable to a person’s lifestyle.”
We snack for a number of reasons. You might crave something sweet or salty, you could actually be hungry, you might be bored or use snacking as a stress-buster.
You may have heard that eating frequent small meals revs up your metabolism. There was a time when nutrition researchers thought that eating six small meals a day was the healthiest way to dine. But recent studies found there’s not much difference in metabolic rates whether you eat a few times or multiple times a day.
Snack savvy
Ideally, a healthy snack should total no more than 150 calories to 200 calories. No shocker: Eating sweets and fats is associated with higher body weights while eating fruits and vegetables as snacks is associated with lower body weights. Another reason those French women don’t get fat.
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