EUGENE, Ore. — To snack or not to snack? That is not the question, because we’re going to snack.
But it doesn’t have to mean cookies, chips and cola. As eating habits evolve, snacking can mean anything from a mini-meal to workout fuel to a healthy interlude to tide us over to lunch or dinner.
“Each person has a different eating personality, and there’s no right or wrong,” said Dr. Anne Thorndike, a general internist and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “It’s just really important to be conscious of what’s in your snacks, and not to just eat mindlessly.”
It’s hard to measure just how much of the American diet consists of snacks. A 2011 U.S. Department of Agriculture report concluded 90% of adults snacked at least once a day – up 30 percentage points in 30 years – and consumed about one-fourth of their total calories between meals.