5 Tips for Ensuring Healthy Snacking

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Healthy Snacking can contribute significantly to essential nutrient intake and to the required caloric intake of persons on an overall healthy diet and those maintaining an overall healthy lifestyle.

5 Tips for ensuring Healthy Snacking include:

  1. Prioritizing planning and preparation:  Of utmost importance is making sure that nutritious options are purchased and available. Further preparing healthy options for easy access can be helpful such as slicing or dicing certain fruits and vegetables.
  2. Establishing a meal and snack schedule: Having a routine for regular meals and possibly snacks and consistently sticking to it reduce the likelihood of meal skipping which can lead to snacking on unhealthy choices when overly hungry.
  3.  Keeping unhealthy snacks out of sight: By removing unhealthy snacks from your pantry and home, you help to keep them out of mind.  Instead, stock up on a variety of healthy options that you also enjoy.                                
  4.  Utilizing Portion Control Principles: Some snack items already come in 'snack sizes' and100 calorie packages. However, for those items that come in larger containers, it is beneficial to take time beforehand to prepare individual servings. 
  5.  Choosing snacks that are nutrient dense and that are nutritionally adequate: Be sure to include snack choices that are rich in protein, healthy fats and fiber.  Great choices are a serving of nuts or seeds, your favorite vegetable sticks with a hummus dip and Greek yogurt with your choice of berries.
                             

                 

Lorna C. Hylledig EDD., MSPH., RDN., LDN

Comments

  1. Ashley ArcherOctober 10, 2023 at 12:54 PM

    Thank you for these great tips! What are some additional examples of healthy snacks? A lot of snacks are advertised as “healthy,” but may be lacking when it comes to nutrient density.

    ReplyDelete

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