Smart Snacking Tips

Snacks have been a part of your life since preschool. They were built into your day to help quiet hungry tummies between breakfast and lunch, then again between lunch and the end of school, typically delivered in the form of Teddy Grahams® and a milk or Goldfish® crackers and a juice box.

Regrettably, this snack ritual gradually disappeared from your day, only to be firmly reinforced as the most important thing you did when you got home from school. Any wonder you're still looking for something to eat between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. every afternoon?

Time Versus Food

Snacks have gotten a bad rap from the diet and health conscious crowd. They're demonized as the cause for obesity, so considered the first thing people have to give up to lose weight. They're monitored in grade school cafeterias while the meals children eat are not. They're selection is rated and debated yet they make up a small part of the diet. Truth is, snacks are terribly misunderstood due to the confusion created by their double meaning.

On the one hand, a snack is a time for eating, an eating occasion that falls between the all-important meals. They are often less formal than meals, rarely eaten seated at a dining table and usually eaten alone. These snacks are a good thing. Eating only three meals a day is not really the best feeding plan for humans, it just happened to be the one most compatible with a working “man's” schedule and became institutionalized.

But in a perfect world (without clocks), we would all be governed by our internal signal of hunger and only eat when the signal goes on, and stop eating when it's off. Snacks would then be no different from meals. They would just be another time to eat.

The other interpretation of the word snacks is that they are a certain type of food, a.k.a. ”snack foods.” Originally noted for their salty, crispy, eat-out-of-your-hand qualities and found predominantly in vending machines, snacks now fill miles of aisles in supermarkets and entire convenience stores. And this is where the trouble begins.

What to Eat When?

As comfortable as most people are in labeling Cheerios and milk as “breakfast foods,” a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup as “lunch foods” and baked chicken with rice and peas as “dinner foods,” there are no nutrition rules about what gets eaten when. There are also no set times in the day known as “breakfast time”, “lunch time” or “dinner time.” This leaves your personal menu wide open to interpretation.

The most important food choice you have to consider each time you reach for something to eat is this: “What else have I already eaten today and what else am I likely to eat before the day is over?” Ultimately, your choices should add up to enough of the right foods in the right amounts to meet your nutritional needs without blowing through your caloric allowance. It doesn't matter in what order the foods you need are eaten, how you combine them or how you space them out over your day.

And while meeting your nutritional needs should be one of the primary factors influencing your food choices, right behind taste but ahead of cost and convenience, not every morsel you put into your mouth has to be a icon on the Food Pyramid. There's room in every diet for some “discretionary calories,” meaning foods or beverages consumed for fun or pleasure, not necessarily nutrient content.

Here's where your favorite snack foods can fit.

BYO or Grab-n-Go

If you take a realistic look at your schedule to figure out where you'll be when you're most likely to get hungry throughout your day, you have a chance to make some strategic food decisions before you leave the house. Depending on how well stocked your pantry is, you can begin by eating some of your basic requirements while still on home turf, then taking along some provisions to satisfy additional needs later on. That's right, go ahead and eat that slice of pizza left in the box, it's a whole lot better than grabbing a bagel and cream cheese with your coffee.

Then think about the foods that are harder to find when away from, namely fruits and vegetables. There's no reason why you can't pack a fruit cup, the leftover vegetable chow mein and a baggie of grape tomatoes to take with you or pick up a banana, a box of raisins and a can of V8 juice on your way to class or work.

Next consider whether you're going to have any social eating opportunities that day that may feature foods heavy in the fat, salt, sugar and alcohol “groups” and low in the light, lean and whole grain options. In that case, your discretionary calories will be used up, so be prepared to avoid any other impulsive eating by toting your own “snacks,” like a granola bar and a yogurt (crunchy-creamy combo) or corn chips and salsa (crispy-spicy combo) or Captain Crunch® and a packet of hot cocoa (sweet and chocolate combo).

The point is, there's no wrong time to eat the right foods and there's way too many times when the wrong foods are all that's available, so take control of the situation. Eating your favorite “snack” foods is not a crime, but not eating everything else you should sort of is.

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Robyn Flipse, MS RD

author of Fighting the Freshman Fifteen

www.FreshmanFifteenbook.com