Snacking, Part 1: Why You Don’t Need to Snack

Keeping the Fire Going

Conventional wisdom says that snacking is good, or at least ok, provided the snack foods themselves are healthy.  The American Heart Association, of all people, says that “If snacking is done in moderation with smart choices, it can fit easily into a healthy dietary pattern.” (Some of their examples of “healthy” snacks include popcorn, crackers, fruit juice, canned fruit, and low-fat yogurt with fruit.  Hmm.  We’ll soon get to why none of those are a good idea). 

 I’ve heard fitness experts restate the conventional wisdom by comparing snacking to putting logs on a fire.  To keep the fire going, you need to keep putting logs on it; to keep your metabolism cranking along (and thus burning more calories), you need to eat every two to three hours.  Otherwise, you will slow down your metabolism (thereby slowing down weight loss) and go into your main meals ravenously hungry – in which case, you will make poor choices and eat too much.

That’s conventional wisdom.  It’s wrong.  Here’s why.

Ancestral Perspective

We don’t know how many times a day prehistoric humans ate.  That’s because there is no set answer; they ate when they could get food, but I would bet that they couldn’t get food every two hours every single day.  We do know that we are biologically adapted to hold onto much more body fat than other primates, indicating that we would often go much longer without eating, even days, in a “natural” environment (even a very lean person with 10% body fat has enough stored fat to live for three weeks without eating). Chimpanzees and gorillas, who are mostly herbivorous, spend hours all day, every day, munching and chewing.  So do most herbivores (think of cows).  We don’t, and in fact we can’t – we don’t have the jaw muscles for it.

Looking at the Hadza and other modern hunter-gatherers, their food intake is far from regular – the year is marked by multiple cycles of feast and famine.  When food is abundant, they eat as much as they can, and when it’s not, they just go without.

Think about it – if the human body were so fragile that we couldn’t go for more than a few hours without eating, how did humans survive for so long in conditions where plant matter was scarce and hunting was the main source of food, such as during the ice ages and in the arctic circle?  

Moving into the historical period, snacking all day was never the norm.  Heck, three solid meals a day historically was probably not the norm.  While reading the ancient Hippocratic medical text On Ancient Medicine recently, (probably written between 450-400 B.C.), I noticed that the author takes it as a given that pretty much everybody is eating either one or two main meals a day.  The idea that you would eat three full meals, let alone five or six smaller meals or snacks, didn’t even occur to him.  Ancient Romans only ate one main meal a day, and would have either one or two smaller meals or snacks earlier in the day.

Even within living memory, most of us probably remember a time when frequent snacking was less widespread.  You probably remember mom or grandma telling you not to snack on the grounds that it would make you fat or ruin your dinner.  

Eating more than three times a day has never been the norm for humans.  Up until five minutes ago, we have all eaten one, two, or three main meals a day, with perhaps a small snack or two, but we certainly weren’t eating every two to three hours.  

Arguments for Snacking

My impression is that many people snack mindlessly.  Most of them don’t consciously do it because they think it’s good for them; it’s just an enjoyable and mindless way of keeping your mouth and your hands busy.

Having said that, there are those who adamantly support snacking on health grounds.  What reasons do they give?

• Snacking keeps your metabolism up (back to the logs on the fire analogy).  If you skip a snack or (perish the thought!) a meal, your body thinks you’re starving and that times are about to get tight – so it decides to slow down your metabolism and hang onto your fat stores, since a famine is clearly coming soon and you’ll need those fat stores to last as long as possible.

• Snacking throughout the day keeps you from getting ravenously hungry between meals.  If you go into your main meals starving, you will be so desperate to get food down your gullet ASAP that you will stuff yourself and eat too much – or make poor choices and eat junk food.

• Snacking keeps your blood sugar from dropping too low.  If you go too long without eating, your blood sugar will drop, leading to tiredness or being “hangry” or maybe even dangerous hypoglycemic episodes.

Why We Don’t Really Need to Snack

All those arguments we just went over for why we “need” to snack may be true – if we are primarily using carbs for fuel and are bad at burning fat.  When our bodies rely almost exclusively on glucose metabolism for energy and are not yet fat-adapted, big blood sugar swings, and corresponding mood swings, are common.  When you eat a lot of carbs, they are metabolized quickly, giving you rapid energy, but that energy is quickly used up.  Since your body is not used to burning fat for fuel, it is not good at accessing your own body fat.  You have loads of fuel on hand, but your body can’t use it, so it gets hangry and tells you to eat more carby snacks!

Eating carby snacks all day is bad for you.  It keeps perpetuating this blood sugar roller coaster, and also leads to a corresponding insulin roller coaster.  Every time you eat and have an insulin spike, it tells your body to go into “energy storage mode” rather than “energy using mode”.  It is very hard to tap into your body fat stores when your insulin is always high.

When you are fat adapted, your body is good at using body fat for fuel.  Your blood sugar doesn’t dip too low when you don’t eat for a few hours.  Your metabolism doesn’t slow down after just a few hours of not eating – as long as you’re eating enough food overall every day (or almost every day), your body is smart enough to know that you are not starving.  

What about going into meals ravenous?  Well, that’s only a problem if unhealthy food is an option.  That hangry, ravenous, eat-whatever-is-in-front-of-you feeling is due to the hypoglycemia resulting from carb overconsumption and the ensuing crash.  If you are eating real, low-carb foods, you will eventually get hungry if you go long enough without eating, but you won’t feel so desperate for food that you’ll eat anything.  

And, if you refill on real foods, you’ll find it much harder to overeat, because protein foods are self-limiting.  Steak and eggs tastes really good when you’re starving – but after you start to fill up, it gets less and less appetizing, and eventually starts to get kind of gross.  You’ll want to stop eating when you are full.  This is not the case with processed carbs.  You’ve probably experienced feeling absolutely stuffed to the gills, yet somehow finding room for more ice cream or cookies.

Not needing to snack all the time, or being able to skip a meal when you have to without feeling weak and faint, is an incredibly liberating experience.  It allows you to get through your day without thinking about food constantly, or having an existential crisis if you need to skip a snack or a meal for some reason.  

Don’t Wean off Snacking Right Away

Eating discrete meals makes it much easier to maintain normal glucose and insulin levels throughout the day, and gives your body a chance to enter fat burning mode rather than fat storage mode. You can get all these benefits eating three meals a day, but many people feel even better by limiting their food consumption to two meals or even one meal a day, or “intermittent fasting” and eating their two or three meals in a ten, eight, six, or even four hour “eating window”.  However, some people, especially women, find that intermittent fasting every day can be perceived as a stressor by their body and makes it hard for them to eat enough total food throughout the day.  If you want to pursue intermittent fasting, play around and see what works for you.

Even if you choose not to pursue intermittent fasting, eventually getting away from snacking and switching to eating three discrete meals a day is a good long-term goal.  Notice I said long-term goal; if you are new to a healthy way of eating, I would not make eliminating all snacking my first priority.  Why?  Well, if you have been a sugar-burner for years, it will take weeks, even months, for your body to become fully “fat-adapted”, and until that happens, you may still find yourself getting hypoglycemic and hangry between meals.  And, when that happens, “compromising” by snacking on acceptable food is far, far preferable to trying to white-knuckle it and then giving in and eating a candy bar when your willpower gives out.

Changing what you eat is a lot more important than changing when you eat.  You could try to change both at once – but since long-term lifestyle change is a marathon, not a sprint, most people will probably find it easier to change one thing at a time and really establish the new habit before trying something else.  

After you have been eating healthy food for a while, you may notice that you naturally are snacking less and going longer between meals without even trying.  If so, don’t feel like you “need” to eat, even if you don’t want to.  It’s fine to wait until you’re really hungry!  

Once you’ve been lower carb for a few months and feel comfortable with your new way of eating, then you can start cutting out all your snacking (assuming you haven’t naturally stopped).  Cut out one snack first, then give it a few weeks to get used to your new eating routine.  Then cut out another snack, wait a few more weeks, and keep repeating until you’re down to one, two, or three discrete meals a day.

So, snacking is neither necessary nor ideal; but, in the big scheme of things what you eat is much more of an issue than when you eat.  What if you are new to healthy eating and feel that you need snacking, at least temporarily, to keep you on the straight and narrow?  Well, in that case, stay tuned for part two, wherein I rank the best healthy snacks!