If you're ready to clean up your diet, you may want to check out your stockpile of snacks in the pantry before you do anything else, as a recent survey found a majority of calories in the American diet comes from snacking, not meals.
Researchers at The Ohio State University have recently conducted a study of more than 20,000 people over the age of 30 to better understand Americans’ eating habits.
The study found that the average American had between 400 and 500 calories worth of snacks a day, which is typically more than what they ate at breakfast.
Even worse, the snacks usually carried little to no nutritional value, according to senior study author Christopher Taylor, who also serves as a professor of medical dietetics in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The Ohio State University.
“Snacks are contributing a meal’s worth of intake to what we eat without it actually being a meal,” Taylor said in a statement. “You know what dinner is going to be: a protein, a side dish or two. But if you eat a meal of what you eat for snacks, it becomes a completely different scenario of, generally, carbohydrates, sugars, not much protein, not much fruit, not a vegetable. So it’s not a fully well-rounded meal.”
The 10-year survey recorded not only daily habits of what people were eating but also when they were eating.
Overall, the study says that snacks made up an average of 19.5% to 22.4% of total energy intake, but at the same time, they contributed “very little nutritional quality.”
As for what’s in the snacks Americans are choosing, researchers said they are often high in fats, sugar, and carbohydrates instead of proteins, fruits, grains, or vegetables.
“We need to go from just less added sugar to healthier snacking patterns,” Taylor said in a statement. “We’ve gotten to a point of demonizing individual foods, but we have to look at the total picture. Removing added sugars won’t automatically make the vitamin C, vitamin D, phosphorus, and iron better. And if we take out refined grains, we lose nutrients that come with fortification.”