Niki Bezzant: Snacking on health

Use snacks as useful opportunities to get a bit more nutrition, rather than as treats. Photo / Getty Images.

Are you a snacker?

It seems people either love to snack, or they're the three-meals-a-day type. I'm largely the latter; most days I tend not to snack, but sometimes if my days are long or my schedule is uneven, I'll need a little something extra to get me to the next meal.

"Snackification" is a big and growing trend in the food industry. As our lives become busier and we have less time for proper meals, the theory goes, we are increasingly inclined to have more frequent, smaller meals instead of the traditional three. Manufacturers are coming to the party with "snack solutions" for us, so we can stay satisfied on the go.

Vegetable-based soup makes for a great snack, as it is filling. Photo / Getty Images.

There used to be a bit of nutrition common wisdom about eating "six small meals a day". The explanation for this was that it kept us from getting too hungry; by eating every couple of hours we stoked our metabolic fire and avoided overeating.

I don't think there was much in the way of science behind that theory; that might be why it fell out of fashion. In reality, although this was often promoted as a weight-loss strategy, what tended to happen was that people ate three regular meals a day plus three substantial snacks, and felt demotivated when they didn't see the scales change.

Nowadays nutritionists are more likely to promote the idea of intuitive eating for health. This is more along the lines of listening to your body; of tuning into its natural signals and following them: eating when you feel hungry; stopping when you feel full.

Chopped up vegetables make a great on-the-go snack. Photo / Getty Images.

That's quite a bit harder than just eating every two hours, especially if we've spent years trying various diets and following strict eating plans. But if we can understand it and get into the practice of eating intuitively, it leads to a healthier relationship with food, and a healthier person.

If we're eating intuitively, chances are we will want to snack sometimes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with snacking, the experts say; it's only a problem if our snacks are frequently less healthy than is ideal.

So it's worthwhile thinking of most of our snacks as useful opportunities to get a bit more nutrition, rather than as treats. That muffin or bit of chocolate is probably not really a treat if you're having it every day, right? And if we think of snacks as potentially a quarter of the food we eat in a day, that's a fair proportion of our potential nourishment, or not.

Yoghurt can be a great snack for weight loss because of its protein content. Photo / Getty Images.

Snacking behaviour can be interesting to examine. If we're habitual snackers – always a biscuit at morning tea time, say – it might be that this is a habit that can be changed for the better.

Are you eating it because you're hungry? Or are you eating it because it's morning tea time? Stopping for a beat and asking yourself if you really want to eat that thing can be a useful way to become a more intuitive eater, and to get better overall nutrition.

If you're snacking because you're hungry, you'll want your snacks to give you a really good nutritional bang for your buck. That means more whole food; less processed.

Ideally, a snack will be a bit like one of those old-school "mini-meals", in that it'll have a bit of protein and a bit of fibre in it, to keep you feeling satisfied for longer.

There are no rules about what a snack can and can't be. If you want to have cereal and yoghurt in the afternoon or a cup of soup in the morning, go for it.

Fruit and veges make great snacks, especially if you can pair them with protein; a sliced apple with some cheddar cheese, for example, or a piece of fruit and a handful of nuts.

There are some good packaged snack options around but watch for health halos. The many, many snack balls and fruit bars on shelves in the health food section may look and taste healthy – and some are – but some are packed with added sugar and calories.

Claims of "raw" and "organic" are nice but are meaningless in terms of nutrition. As is "no refined sugar". There's no official definition for this term, and unrefined sugar is just the same, to your body, as refined sugar is.

Dried fruit occupies a bit of a grey area; it's concentrated sugar, so not the same as whole fruit. But bliss balls and the like are often packed with it.

If in doubt, when it comes to snacks, go for whole foods. And as with all meals, a little preparation goes a long way. Having a stash of healthy snack options on hand makes it just that bit easier to nourish yourself when hunger strikes.

* Niki Bezzant is a food and nutrition writer and speaker, and editor-at-large for Healthy Food Guide healthyfood.com. Follow Niki @nikibezzant/