Will eating between meals encourage you to put on weight – or keep you lean? Is there such a thing as a healthy snack? Here’s what the science says
In terms of diet, humans can best be described as “omnivorous opportunists”. We don’t have the multichambered stomachs that help herbivores subsist on grass, but we have more molars than the average carnivore. Maybe it is no surprise, then, that we love to snack: we don’t need to graze, but neither are we into eating a whole gazelle, then sleeping for 20 hours.
The trouble is that things have moved on since we were grabbing a handful of berries here and an unwary rabbit there; these days, we are rarely more than a minute away from a couple of custard creams or a banana. Is our inbuilt inclination to snack doing us irreparable damage, or do all those calories even out in the end? And if you work in an office full of feeders, what is your best course of action?
