I nearly cried with disappointment when reading the papers this week. It was the frankly nightmare revelation that eating healthy main meals does not, after all, offset unhealthy snacks. I live my entire dietary life on the basis that if I am eating home-cooked, whole foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it will offset the Toffee Crisp at 4pm and a handful of crisps at 6pm.
King’s College London researchers found that a quarter of adults undo the benefits of their healthy mealtimes by eating unhealthy snacks. Dr Sarah Berry, chief scientist at ZOE, who was involved in the the study said: “Considering 95 per cent of us snack, and nearly a quarter of our calories come from snacks, swapping unhealthy snacks such as cookies, crisps and cakes to healthy snacks like fruit and nuts is a really simple way to improve your health.” Yeah well, duh.
Don’t worry, I know all about Ultra-Processed Food (UPFs). I was a child in the 80s and lived off Angel Delight, Tracker Bars and AlphaBites. Then I was a teenager in the 90s and lived off Doritos, Fanta and Pot Noodles.
In my thirties and now in my forties, my diet is way better. I eat live yoghurt, berries, seeds, lentils, vegetables, chickpeas, fish, some chicken if I’m lucky. Red meat twice a year. During term time, when I have the mental space and proximity to good groceries, I do all the things you’re supposed to do when it comes to eating. Promise, promise. Not even any takeaways. Well, hardly ever.
But once I have done all my work for the day and I am back from the school run, I want to sit down to a cup of tea and a bloody Toffee Crisp if I feel like it. Later, once I have cleared up my children’s supper and before I embark on adult’s dinner, I want to listen to the 6 O’Clock news on Radio 4, eat a bowl of crisps and drink a gin and tonic.
I have a perfectly nice life but I spend the majority of my day rigidly fulfilling a list of duties, mostly to other people. In these two guaranteed down-moments of my day I want to let go of my time-consuming, quite careful diet and bang crisps into my mouth, as if I were 23 again.
And I tell myself, as I bite into my chocolate or salty snack, that it’s fine, because all the anti-oxidants and free radicals in the fresh tomato salad I ate at lunchtime and all the legumes I am going to eat at dinner will tackle the evil UPF particles in the snack, no problemo. It will be like PacMan eating those little pellets, no?
Well, says Dr Saira Hameed, a consultant endocrinologist from Imperial College, I might be better off examining the reasons behind the motivation for the snack in the first place. “In my experience,” she says, “people who eat main meals and also snack are either not eating enough at the meal or their macros are a bit off. What I mean is – protein is the most satiating macronutrient – if you have an omelette for lunch your physical hunger and drive to snack will be far less than if you have a sandwich for lunch.”
It’s not just that, says Dr Hameed, “habits also play a part”. “If we are conditioned to expect biscuits at 4pm, then that becomes a habitual behaviour even when, biologically, we don’t need that food.” And don’t forget, adds Hameed, that there is an entire industry built around the idea that you need, want or deserve a treat in food form, as a reward. “Why has this now become a normalised way of eating? It wasn’t usually part of the eating pattern of past generations.” (The answer, of course, is money. The revenue of the snack food market in the UK is £2.83bn).
But is there really nothing in my theory about my breakfast blueberries offsetting the 6pm Tyrrell’s Salt and Cider Vinegar snack? What about the anti-oxidants? The Pac Man free radicals eating the pellets of potato maltodextrin? “You’re not completely wrong about that,” says Maya Oakley, who is a nutritional therapist. “But you have to put it all in context.”
“The most important question to ask is, ‘Are you well?’ and to examine what your tolerance is to these sorts of foods. If you are metabolically well, you will have a certain buffer zone between you and the harmful effects of UPF. But it is best to think about it as eating 80 per cent healthily, 80 per cent of the time.
“A thing I see often is people who binge on unhealthy food at the weekend but eat well during the week. That actually puts quite a burden on the body – lurching from one extreme to the other isn’t ideal… for example, if you were going to eat a frozen pizza I would advise that you load up the other half of your plate with plenty of antioxidant veg and greens to counteract it.”
Oakley though, like many nutritionists, doesn’t ban herself from eating anything. “I don’t like substitutes for things, like fake meat. If I want a certain thing I will have it and really enjoy it. I don’t believe in feeling guilty. And it is very easy to become very disordered about food.
“With certain patients, I do encourage them to eat one thing that is considered ‘unhealthy’ as part of their diet plan. Fear and anxiety around food is as much a part of the problem as anything else.” Oh my god, phew. Music to my ears! Don’t know about you, but I’m going to stick the kettle on to celebrate.
