Eating snacks of poor quality or at night reduces cardiometabolic health

Key takeaways:

• Snacking at any time of day except for night was not linked to negative health outcomes.
• According to a researcher, changing snacking habits can be a simple dietary strategy.

BOSTON — Late-evening snacking was associated with unfavorable blood glucose and lipid levels, but consuming higher quality snacks may result in health benefits, according to researchers.

“The importance of the quality of the snacks is the main takeaway for me,” Sarah Berry, PhD, an associate professor in the department of nutritional sciences at King’s College London, told Healio. “Understanding that all snacking is not equal, and making sure we have access to healthy snacks is likely to be really important for our overall health.”

Berry and colleagues, who presented their research at NUTRITION, conducted a study to better understand how snacking habits impact health. They used data from 1,001 participants in the United Kingdom who were enrolled in the ZOE PREDICT 1 study. The participants had a mean age of 46 years and 73% were women.

Of the cohort, 95% were snackers and had a mean snack intake of 2.28 snacks per day.

Overall, the researchers found that high-quality snacking was associated with favorable triglyceride (P < .05) and insulin (P < .05) concentrations and insulin resistance (P < .05), while snack quantity was not.

Late-evening snacking, defined as eating after 9 p.m., was linked to unfavorable HbA1c concentrations (P < .001), postprandial glucose (P = .01) and postprandial triglycerides (P = .01) when compared with morning, afternoon and evening snacking.

Berry said it was exciting to find that “eating multiple times a day, as long as it’s not late in the evening, wasn’t associated with any negative health outcomes.”

“So, from a practical point, if you are someone who grazes throughout the day like me, it’s not bad for you, as long as you are not eating really late and the food is good quality,” she said.

Berry noted that the findings are relevant to primary care physicians “because of the large energy contribution that snacks make to our diets, so therefore it is a very simple dietary strategy to change our snacking choices to benefit our metabolic health.”

“The messaging of reducing late-night snacking and increasing the quality of the things we snack on are simple changes which could make a big difference,” she said.

Future research, Berry said, will examine the impact of specific snacking behaviors on individuals.

“For example, in women it would be interesting to see how the menstrual cycle and menopause might impact the response to snacking,” she said.

References:

• Bermingham K, et al. Snacking timing and quality is significantly associated with cardiometabolic health outcomes: The ZOE PREDICT study. Presented at: NUTRITION; July 22-25, 2023; Boston.
• Is snacking bad for your health? It depends on what and when you eat. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/995504. Published July 24, 2023. Accessed July 24, 2023.