How you snack has bigger impact on health than how much, study says
BOSTON - How you snack has a bigger impact on your health than how much you snack.
More than 90 percent of us eat one or more snacks a day, contributing to 20 to 25 percent of our daily caloric intake, but is all this snacking bad for us?
Researchers looked at the snacking behaviors of more than a thousand U.K. residents and found that poor quality snacks, like those with a lot of saturated fat and sugar, and late-night snacking (after 9 p.m.) were associated with worse lipid levels and worse responses to insulin. However, high-quality snacks were linked to better lipid and better insulin responses.
How often people snacked or how many calories they consumed while snacking did not seem to impact these measures of cardiometabolic health. High-quality snacks are those with higher amounts of nutrients relative to calories such as a handful of nuts, sliced apples with peanut butter, or carrots and hummus.