Why snacking could be GOOD for your waistline
We’re told it makes you fat. But when this non-stop grazer gave up for a month, she gained weight
For our grandparents, eating just three meals a day was the norm. But fastforward to the 21st century and most of us have become grazers, snacking our way through the day — with supposedly disastrous results for our health.
Last week, a report by the World obesity Federation warned that threequarters of adults will be overweight or obese by 2025. one culprit? Snacking.
‘People do tend to snack, they impulse-buy . . . and have snacks in their handbags,’ said Dr Tim Lobstein, the organisation’s policy director.
Snacking doesn’t just make us fat, it makes our livers fat, according to a study from the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, published in the Journal of Hepatology last year. This found that snacking (especially on high-fat, highsugar foods) is worse for the liver than consuming larger meals and is associated with a higher amount of abdominal fat.
The researchers concluded that ‘snacking, a common feature in the Western diet, independently contributes to hepatic steatosis [fatty liver] and obesity’.
A fatty liver can lead to liver damage and failure, while abdominal fat, particularly fat around the organs, is linked to a raised risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The theory is that snacking keeps our insulin levels raised, which encourages fat storage.
All this puts the frighteners on someone like me, definitely one of life’s ‘grazers’. But it also leaves me confused, because there are plenty of experts who insist eating ‘little and often’ is good for you — keeping you slim, healthy and fizzing with energy. THE hope is that smaller, more frequent meals help to keep blood sugar levels stable, avoiding drastic crashes that leave us seeking out the nearest Mars bar.
I tend to have a small breakfast and lunch, then snack assiduously throughout the day.
My choices are half healthy (almonds, raisins, Greek yoghurt, fruit) and half not (sugary granola, chocolate, a pizza slice from the kids’ dinner). Then I’ll eat a more substantial meal in the evening. I suspect my total daily intake hovers between 1,800 to 2,300 calories, depending on how hungry I feel.
But would I be healthier sticking to three square meals after all? Would I feel more energised? To find out, I stopped snacking for a month. But first I underwent a series of health tests.
For a self- confessed snacker apparently on the road to health hell, I was actually in pretty good shape; my blood sugar level was 4.7 (within the desirable range of between 3.5 and 7.9) and my cholesterol was 5.2 (a tiny bit raised — the optimum is less than 5). My waist at 29 in and weight (7½ st — I’m 5 ft 2in) put me in slim, possibly slightly underweight, category.
I do feel tired occasionally and the iron test found I was pre-anaemic — my reading was 12.5 umol/L (the acceptable range is 6.6 to 26) but a snack of raisins and granola, or a chocolate bar usually revives me.
I begin the experiment feeling anxious — I realise I love the freedom of being able to eat when I feel like it — and my anxiety is justified; on day one I have to force myself to eat two slices of toast, and scrambled egg. I manage until lunch, but feel irritated at having to eat and eat (soup, toast, tuna, and a ‘dessert’ of granola).
By dinner time, I feel wild with hunger, and even though I have a decent plate of salmon, baked potato and green beans, it isn’t enough. I eat more chocolate afterwards than I normally would, then fruit, and feel bloated.
I soon realise that eating lunch at 1pm is disastrous, as I’m shaking with hunger by 6pm. So I try eating breakfast later, and lunch at 2.30pm. I include protein, and carbs, and vegetables at every meal.
Shifting the meals helps reduce the hunger pangs, but I am never able to eat enough at dinner to go to bed satisfied. one evening at midnight, I break the rules by pulling at the carcass of a roast chicken.
After just ten days of hearty breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, I do feel different: I feel fatter.
In fact, my waist is now 31 in, and I’ve gained 4 lb. Two weeks later, I’ve ballooned to 8st.
I’m annoyed, but not surprised, partly because I’ve been overeating out of fear (‘Nothing for another six hours!’). Normally, if I overeat, it’s from hunger, and I naturally eat less at the next sitting.
But I feel like I’m no longer responding to instinctive need. In the stomach-growling gap between lunch and dinner, I feel ravenous.
The effect of eating three meals is not improving my diet, as I just can’t eat enough at the strictly appointed mealtimes to sustain me for hours on end. So I beeline for stodgy, fatty, sugary foods when I’m ‘allowed’ to eat.
Dr Helen Webberley, the medical director of Medichecks, where I had my tests, says: ‘If you cut out meals and starve yourself, your body will cry out for something instantly gratifying, high sugar, to get your blood sugar up really quickly, or high fat.’ WORSE, I’m grumpy — and two weeks in, I start to feel exhausted. I usually go to bed at midnight, and sleep reasonably well. Now I’m falling asleep on the sofa at 10.30pm — I wake up more often, I suspect from hunger. A week later, I catch a cold, my first in years.
Dr Webberley feels we can’t draw any scientific conclusions from this, but, privately, I think this three-meals-a-day regimen doesn’t agree with me, my body’s natural rhythms or its immune system.
Consultant dietitian Sian Porter isn’t surprised I find three meals a day difficult, as with my relatively healthy snack habit, ‘you’ve found a rhythm that works well for you’.
My switch to Fifties-style mealtimes means I’m suffering ‘twice over’, says Sian. ‘You’re having to eat until you feel uncomfortable, and experiencing hunger as well.’
She does believe there are advantages to bigger meals. If you snack, ‘snacking can be about reward, and it can be hard to get all the nutrition you need — it requires planning’, she says. ‘Snacks can be less nutrient dense, with fewer minerals such as iron, while meals tend to contain more protein and vegetables, fibre, vitamins and minerals.’
So snacking certainly explains why my iron levels are low.
Sian suggests ideal snacks include a portion of fruit; a handful of unsalted nuts; a slice of wholegrain toast with one tablespoon of peanut butter; a small tub of cottage cheese with vegetable sticks; a piece of fruit; or two oatcakes and one tablespoon of hummus or lower-fat cream cheese and cherry tomatoes.
But how often should we snack? Sian suggests it’s ‘when you feel stomach hunger, not head hunger — which is usually four or so hours after a meal’.
Three weeks in, I’ve managed to stick to my new regimen, with only the odd infringement. To find out what this might mean for my health, I consult Dr Moira Taylor, an associate professor in human nutrition at Nottingham University, a specialist in meal patterns.
She believes that regularity of meals is important for good health — that obesity and its risks are partly caused by ‘a much more chaotic meal pattern’. She says this could be, for instance, ‘skipping breakfast this day, eating it the next day, skipping lunch one day, eating three meals the next’.
‘If you skip breakfast every morning, you actually have a regular meal pattern,’ she explains. ‘We’ve found that having a more regular meal pattern would appear to be more beneficial for blood sugar and levels of fat in your blood. It may be that the actual number of meals isn’t important.
‘In regard to long-term health, a regular steady intake throughout the day is better for you. Whether that is three or six times a day doesn’t really matter.’
I comfort myself with the thought that, even though I snack, my snacking habits are regular.
A study by Jill Kanaley, a professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri, offers more hope. She found that when obese women ate fewer, larger meals, as opposed to smaller amounts more regularly, it made no difference to blood sugar and cholesterol levels in the short term. PROVING Professor Kanaley’s point, after a month of three meals a day, blood tests show that my cholesterol levels and blood sugar remain exactly the same. But my i ron and calcium l evels have increased by several points.
Dr Webberley feels it’s not significant as ‘these do vary from day to day’. But I wonder whether the one benefit of my three-meal-a- day regimen has been to increase my iron intake (more leafy green vegetables, possibly).
What does this mean for the study that suggested snacking was worse for the liver?
Dr Webberley says the study’s results have not been widely replicated, adding: ‘ As long as what you’re eating over 24 hours is the same, you’re just eating in a different way. And the body’s quite good at managing it. If you have a big meal, it’s all out producing the insulin to get rid of the sugar. If you have small meals, it just gives you a little bit of insulin now and again to get rid of the sugar.
‘Some people do better eating little and often, even if some of what they eat is rubbish. They can’t get on with being restricted to three meals a day, because it’s not frequent enough feeding.’
I’m one of those. Listening to your body, responding to instinctive hunger is key. Within two weeks of resuming my normal grazing habits, I’ve lost most of that extra half stone, and I’m sleeping more soundly.
I’ll never feel bad about my snack habit — including that daily dose of chocolate — again.
medichecks.com