The Healthy Supplies Guide to Safe Snacking | |
There are many people who believe that snacking is a sin. We're often taught from an early age that snacking will "spoil your dinner", or make you get fat. We grow up teaching ourselves to fight the urge to snack, no matter how strong.
However, if you are hungry during the day and deny yourself snacks, then time you get to dinner, you are starving hungry and eat the entire kitchen table. This is not a good thing!
Human beings evolved to be hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors picked nuts and berries for food, and did not have strict mealtimes. Though, of course, they had regular shared meals, they also had lots of irregular meals, picked directly from trees and eaten on the spot. Snacking is natural.
Starvation between meals is a very bad thing indeed. Hunger is largely driven by 2 things: the state of your stomach, and blood sugar levels. Broadly speaking, when your stomach has been empty for a while and your blood sugar levels drop, you start to feel the first pangs of hunger. If your blood sugar levels continue to drop, you start to feel reasonably hungry. If a main meal is not imminent, and you have felt like this for around 10 minutes, then it's a good time to have a snack. It's your body's way of asking you politely to eat something!
If you fail to satisfy your hunger, your blood sugar levels will decrease further, and your body will start to use its glycogen reserves. Glycogen is a glucose polymer that is used by the body for medium-term storage of energy (fat being the body's long-term energy store). Glycogen is a more readily available source of energy than fat, and the body will burn glycogen first if your blood sugar levels are low enough.
This type of glycogen-burning is something that is best avoided. It's hard to resist the ravenous hunger at the next meal as your body tries to replenish its glycogen stores. It tends to overcompensate, leading to over-eating and weight gain.
Having the right sort of snack will nip this in the bud by keep your blood sugar levels constant. The best snacks to have are snacks that are completely free of refined sugar, have a mixture of energy sources, mainly slow-release, and which digest slowly.
Of course, overall, if you are aiming to lose weight, then you should snack with caution. But it's important to realise that starvation is not the right way of going about it. The idea is to eat enough to take the edge off hunger, and to eat foods that are low-fat and that do not contain refined sugars. Also see our weight loss section. |
