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Good Question
Is Snacking Healthy?
New research intensifies the debate
Americans are inveterate snackers.
More than 90% of the U.S. population eats at least one snack a day, and most of us eat several. Some experts have called snacking “a hallmark of the American dietary pattern.”
Our enthusiasm for snacking isn’t new. Between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, the average number of snacks we consumed hardly budged; we ate two or three snacks a day back then, and that’s about how many we eat now.
While we may not be snacking more frequently than we used to, there’s some evidence that our snacks have gotten bigger.
Measured in calories, the average American man’s daily snack intake has ballooned by 26% since the early ’70s, while the average woman’s has increased by 48%. That’s according to a 2015 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which concluded that snacks now make up roughly a quarter of the average American’s daily energy intake, and so effectively constitute a fourth meal.
These sorts of findings have prompted some doctors and dietitians to highlight snacking as a likely contributor to the country’s escalating rates of obesity and severe obesity. This opinion contradicts the once-dominant expert view that snacking helps curb hunger and reduces mealtime portion sizes, and so is helpful.
The more often we eat, the anti-snack faction argues, the more opportunities we have to overeat. If we could just quit snacking, everything would get better.
While there’s some evidence to support this position, the case against snacking is shaky.
A 2021 editorial in the Journal of Health Design — provocatively titled “Is snacking the new smoking?” — argued that calorie-dense snack foods have replaced tobacco products as a means of unhealthy self-reward and stress reduction, and that the pandemic has likely exacerbated our reliance on food as a form of emotional comfort.
This snack-as-safety-blanket idea has some solid research behind it.
“Emotional states are dangerous for people who are trying to eat sensibly,” says Kent Berridge, PhD, a distinguished university professor of…
