Snacking can be initiated due to several reasons such as hunger, eating patterns, psychological issues, physiologic cues, and others but surely has a lot of relevance with your heart health and weight. There are lots of studies conducted that shows snacking can have a serious impact on health, positive when it is good snacking and negative when it is bad snacking.
It all depends on how you define your eating occasion to distinguish between a snack and a meal as well as several other factors including:
- Your desire to eat
- The type of food you eat
- The time of eating and the gap between a snack and a meal
- Your age and even your sex along with
- Several other socioeconomic factors.
According to research, all these factors may make a person to either eat more in the amount as well as in the number of times or less.
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The heart health
Heart health is something that is significantly affected by the type and time of snacks. Proper snacking will facilitate cardiovascular functions and other health markers such as:
- Your lipid profile
- Level of cholesterol
- TG concentrations
- Blood pressure
- Insulin sensitivity
- Level of blood sugar
- Fat absorption and deposits and much more.
If you snack frequently it may improve lipid profiles and in turn, may decrease the risks of any cardiovascular diseases but there is a significant difference between nibbling and feasting.
- Studies have found that nibbling usually results in low total and LDL cholesterol concentrations as well as blood pressure.
- On the other hand, additional studies confirmed that frequent meal consumption also resulted in low total and LDL cholesterol levels.
This shows the pattern of frequent eating instead of snacking but in both the cases it suggests that consuming food more frequently throughout the day can improve your blood sugar as well as lipid concentrations. This eating pattern can be a result of snacking.
The weight concerns
No matter how many studies are conducted, there is no significant indication or understanding about the effects of frequent eating on weight, though most people believe that eating more means gain in weight. This is due to the fact that they do not know the difference between eating more in amount and eating more number of times but in small portions, atypical in snacking.
- According to experts, snacking as it does not have any specific or any unambiguous correlation with your weight. However, they suggest that healthy weight maintenance or weight gain or loss entirely depends on your food choice involving high or low diet quality.
- In fact, there are several reports that have been analyzed and found that relation between snacking and weights have an inverse correlation in both adults as well as children between adiposity and snacking.
According to the report reviews, such correlation exists and is found to be positive only when it is attuned for underreporting.
Therefore, it can be said that there is a significant nuance regarding the different relations between weights and eating frequencies and in most cases it was found to have an inverse relation with body fat when it comes to an individual having normal weight within the range of 25 or less in Body Mass Index or BMI.
Typically, when it comes to weight, it is more positively related to the circumference of the waist of the individual and the thickness of the subcutaneous fat. This determines whether a person is overweight or not.
However, these relations can be easily mitigated by your careful choice of food items that you have ordered for snacks delivery. It depends on your personal preference. It is seen that people who are overweight and obese tend to eat more snack items that include:
- Crisps
- Chocolates
- Sweets
- Ice cream.
On the other hand, a person having a good BMI often resorts to yogurt and nuts when it comes to snack time.
On the basis of these results, it can be concluded that the pre-existing health status of a person may influence their snacking choices and their effects on weight.
The snack choices
Therefore, heart health and weight conditions will typically depend on the choice of foods and beverages that you want to have for snacks. This will further contribute to better fulfillment of your nutrient insufficiencies as well as to avoid nutrition excesses. You may tend to think at this point that it only depends on your personal choice of snacking items which is not true since the government also has set a few specific dietary guidelines on snacking habits.
However, snacking patterns relies basically on food preferences for snacks. It is usually similar to people living in the same areas of the world. For example, if you see the snacking pattern of people of the United States you will see that:
- People often opt for salty snacks or candy, desserts or sweetened beverages
- Of these salty snacks became particularly popular since 1977
- In 2006, chips were introduced as salty snacks
- Nuts alone comprised about 14.3% of the total snacks consumed.
In comparison, if you see the research results of Canada you will see that most of the youth prefer popcorn, crackers, and pretzels as salty snacks.
Since 1977 and within 2006, there was an overall decrease in the preference for sweet snacks in people of the United States however desserts made 19.6% of snacks even in 2006. It was also seen that there was a significant decrease in milk and dairy products, fruits and juices when it comes to snack selection.
In addition to that, there is also an increase seen in the consumption of caloric beverages during snacking which adds more to the already grave concern. This is because sweetened beverages are not only high in calories but are also very low in nutritional value affecting your energy in the process.
In short, most of the snack foods chosen by the people are comparatively poor in nutritional value and are energy-dense. Therefore, these specific types of foods raise the concern of the government for the health of the public in general.
