Everyone has their thoughts on the proper way to snack, and now even science has an opinion.
A new study revealed that snacking isn’t necessarily bad for you — as long as you snack on nutritious foods and avoid doing it late at night.
There has long been debate on whether or not snacking is good for you, and the information around snacking and being healthy can be confusing and inconsistent.
In fact, “surprisingly little has been published on snacking, despite the fact that it accounts for 20-25 percent of energy intake,” Kate Bermingham, a researcher in Nutritional Sciences at King’s College London and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
Researchers at King’s College London looked at data from over 1,000 people to determine if snacking affects health and if the quality of the snack matters.
The study was part of the ZOE PREDICT project, a series of large in-depth studies for nutritional research designed by the personalized nutrition app ZOE.
Participants kept a food diary and wore blood sugar monitors to track their personal snacking habits. This data allowed Bermingham and her team to see the relationship between quantity, quality and timing of snacking with blood fats and insulin — both of which are measurements of heart health and metabolism.
“We observed only weak relationships between snack quality and the remainder of the diet, which highlights snacking as an independent modifiable dietary feature that could be targeted to improve health,” Bermingham said.
Bermingham presented her results on Monday in Boston at NUTRITION 2023, an annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition.
Out of those who partook in the study, 95% had at least one snack per day — with an average of 2.28 daily snacks — making up roughly 22% of daily calorie consumption.
Researchers found that there were four patterns of snacking that impacted how a person’s body reacts to snacking: morning snackers (more than half of daily snacks consumed before noon), afternoon snackers (between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m.), evening snackers (after 6 p.m.), and those no distinct snacking pattern — also referred to “grazers.”
Those who snacked after 9 p.m. had worse blood glucose and fat markers compared to those who snacked during the day, which could be due to the snacks shortening the fasting window between dinner and breakfast and slowing down the process of breaking down and metabolizing food.
While about 17% of participants were classified as “grazers,” one in three were “late evening snackers” — eating the majority of their snacks after 9 p.m.
The study also revealed that the quality of the food a person snacks on plays a more important role than the quantity or frequency. High-quality snacks tend to have healthier levels of blood glucose and fat levels, such as fruits, veggies and nuts.
“Our study showed that the quality of snacking is more important than the quantity or frequency of snacking, thus choosing high-quality snacks over highly processed snacks is likely beneficial,” Bermingham said. “Timing is also important, with late-night snacking being unfavorable for health. This may mean that, universally, snacking late in the evening and interrupting the overnight fasting window is detrimental to health.”