Snacking: Tips for Making Healthy Choices and Avoiding Common Pitfalls.

Snacking is something that we are all familiar with. Whether you are on the go and grabbing that Protein bar, or sitting on the sofa at night watching Netflix and suddenly have a craving for chips, snacking is part of our lives whether we like it or not.

In my most recent workshop, we discussed what drives us to snack, the benefits of snacking, pitfalls, and how to make good nutritious choices when it comes to snacking.

First we looked at the definition of snacking, which as you would likely guess is the consumption of smaller portions of food throughout the day to fill in gaps between meals to satisfy hunger or cravings. Snacks are smaller meals that are consumed casually throughout the day and can range from a piece of fruit, nuts, chips, seeds, berries etc...

Unfortunately the snack food industry has blown up and there are thousands of products out there that you can buy in easy to carry single serving packages, but when we disect the food labels and ingredients , they aren't necessarily packing much of a nutritious punch. That's not to say there aren't good products out there that come in packages, but it's important to know how to determine if you should leave it on the shelf or put it in your cart.

In my workshop, we discussed the common pitfalls of snacking, and surprise surprise, when asked the number one thing that everyone agreed upon is that they tend to always gravitate towards unhealthy snacks after dinner when they sit down to watch television. When I asked them why they feel they need to snack late at night they didn't have an answer other than boredom. They weren't hungry as they had just eaten their dinner within a couple hours. We then discussed the types of snacks they gravitate towards, and it wasn't surprising to hear that it was things like chips, chocolate, candy, or packaged snacks. The thing about snacking on these types of foods is that we pretty much already know that they hold little to no nutritional value, they are typically loaded with sugars, preservatives to keep them shelf stable and are engineered specifically to be hyper palatable and to make you want more. I used an example I've heard before when explaining the hyper palatability of snacks such as potato chips. Take a big bag of chips, each bag is made using approximately 4-5 potatoes. Let's say they use only 2-3 potatoes even. How easy is it for you to eat a whole bag of potato chips while you're binging your fave show? Pretty easy, right? Ok, so let's now take 2-3 potatoes and bake them. How many of those potatoes would you be able to sit down and eat before you raise the white surrender flag and say "I just can't eat anymore". Pretty fast, right? That is just one example of how we are marketed and swayed as consumers to buy processed snack foods. The thing I have learned for myself because I am definitely not immune to this marketing, is that I cannot allow myself to buy these items. Have you ever heard of the term , in the cart , in the stomach. It's 100% true. So how can we satisfy that boredom or look for ways to eat healthy snacks. I used to have a client that couldn't break the habit of snacking after dinner at night while watching tv. When I had asked her if she was hungry, she said that she wasn't but she had cravings. I explained the difference of hunger vs cravings to her. Hunger is when you'll eat anything without being picky because you truly need to get fuel into your body. Cravings usually come from a place of boredom, and in some instances it they could also come from nutrient deficiencies, but that's a topic for another day. As an alternative to snacking because we knew it came out of boredom, I asked her if she likes tea. She told me that yes she enjoys herbal teas. Because her cravings out of boredom were at night , I didn't want her to have anything with caffeine, otherwise she wouldn't sleep. So, I suggested that she try having a non caffeinated herbal tea and sip it while she watched her shows. Lo and behold in one of our weekly check ins, she mentioned that she didn't feel the need to grab chips or chocolate out of the pantry and the teas were filling that void. This became her nightly ritual and she did a great job of curbing the ghost cravings.

Eating snacks is not a bad thing, in fact there a lot of benefits to eating snacks. They fill in the gaps as we mentioned when you are between meals and feel like you need a bit more nourishment and they offer additional nutrients that your body needs to maintain optimal health. I typically like to eat vegetables for my snacks personally, such as carrots, celery, bell peppers, with a home made hummus as that helps ensure that I get enough servings of vegetables in my diet as well as fibre, which is important to digestion, maintaining a healthy bodyweight and helps with cardiovascular health. Keeping a piece of fruit on hand during the day is a great idea. The age old saying an apple a day keeps the doctor away isn't just a saying. Apples are great to give you a quick boost of energy through the day and again they have fibre in them. There's no special way you have to do snacks, they don't have to be fancy, it just has to be a whole food that you enjoy that you can prep ahead of time and bring with you as a grab and go item. Again, snacks are meant to fill in the gaps.

Now, of course there are many snack type foods on the market now that are marketed with health claims on the package such as "high in fibre" , "20g of protein" "all natural", "organic" and the list goes on. Although this is fine to eat in moderation, we are all human after all. It's important to know how to properly read nutrition labels and how to spot the marketing that is typically on packaging as just that, marketing. In my workshop, I taught the group the basics but important things to look for when they are reading a nutrition label and food packaging. One of the most obvious or not so obvious to all things I taught them about is the various names that are out there for sugar. The last time I dove deep into the depths of the internet to see how many alternative names for sugar there was, it was something like 61. I am sure that number has grown since then. I also taught the group that ingredients on packaging is always listed in the order of the highest concentrated ingredient. Often times a high sugar food will list sugar within the top few ingredients, but then later on in the ingredient list you will see an alternative name(s) for sugar, which means there is even MORE sugar in the product! I personally typically aim for products that have 8 ingredients or less listed. The fewer the ingredients, the less processed the food is. The closer we eat to whole foods, the more nutrients we will absorb and the better our health will be overall.

In addition to the misleading health claims usually written on the front of the packaging, and the sugars, we also reviewed paying attention to serving sizes. A lot of the time a serving size is much smaller than what we would actually consume. People tend to just look at the calories per serving, see a nice low number but consume 3 times the serving amount that is on the package. Chips are another good example of this. It will say something like 150 calories per 150 grams or approximately 23 chips (this is just random numbers I have come up with), but the reality is that you might eat the whole bag or even half the bag which is double the serving amount, therefore the caloric intake increases. Something else that most people are not aware of is that per the FDA, nutrition labels are allowed to have a 20-30% variance of what is listed on packages. So if a product says it's 100calories per serving there is a very good chance that the product could actually be 120 or 130 calories per serving because they are obviously going to go with the lower number on the packaging. This is not always the case, but it is something to be mindful of when buying packaged or processed foods. With whole foods you don't have to worry about this as much because well Broccoli is just Broccoli and doesn't have anything other than Broccoli in it.

The key take away I wanted to share in my workshop is that snacking doesn't have to be painful, it has benefits and plays a role in overall nutrition, but it is easy to succumb to the many pitfalls due to marketing and the easy accessibility of packaged processed foods. There are also ways to combat that snacking out of boredom. It might mean some habit shifts and trying different and new alternatives to curb those cravings, but trying different things, planning ahead and educating yourself is the first step!