7 snacks for a longer & healthier life | Prof Sarah Berry

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
How many meals do you eat today? Most of you, like me, probably have three. Would you be surprised if I told you there's a fourth meal that you eat every day that might be harming your health? On average, snacking accounts for around one quarter of our energy intake each day, the equivalent of an extra meal. But most of us give it little thought. We assume that if we eat healthy meals, we'll be fine. Snacks are often an afterthought or considered a dirty secret, but they shouldn't be, because snacking right might actually be the key to good health. Today I'm joined by Professor Sarah Berry, ZOE's Chief Scientist and Professor in Nutrition at King's College London. She'll explain why snacks shouldn't be ignored and how they can be one of the most powerful tools in your mission to improve your overall health. By the end of today's episode, you'll have seven snacks chosen to support a longer and healthier life. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today.

**Sarah Berry** (1:17)
Pleasure. I'm so excited to talk about one of my favorite topics.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:21)
Which is, of course, snacking. So I have a bunch of questions from our listeners. So why don't we jump straight into it with the Q&A. Is snacking always bad for you?

**Sarah Berry** (1:33)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:34)
If a snack says natural on the label, does that mean it's healthy?

**Sarah Berry** (1:39)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:40)
Does it matter when you snack?

**Sarah Berry** (1:42)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:44)
Is chocolate always bad?

**Sarah Berry** (1:46)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:48)
Could I snack and make myself healthier?

**Sarah Berry** (1:50)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:52)
And finally, what's the biggest misconception that you've heard about snacking?

**Sarah Berry** (1:57)
The biggest misconception, in my opinion, about snacking is that having multiple snacks throughout the day is bad for your health, bad for your waist, bad for your weight.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:09)
And that's not true?

**Sarah Berry** (2:10)
That's not true.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:11)
Well, that is already good news.

**Sarah Berry** (2:14)
It does depend, Jonathan, on the snack. We can dive into that.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:18)
All right. Well, I imagine we're going to get into that. Now, I think like many of our listeners, honestly, I'm constantly thinking about a snack. And I'm also constantly feeling guilty about it because I can hear my grandmother saying, Jonathan, you'll ruin your dinner if you eat that. So in my mind, snacking is definitely like a bad thing. And I know you've been conducting some very large scale research on snacking, Sarah. So I'm really excited to find out just how guilty I should feel. How common is snacking?

**Sarah Berry** (2:53)
So snacking is really common, particularly in the UK, in the US, but many, many countries rely on snacks for a huge proportion of their calories. In the UK, in the US, we see that about 95% of people have at least one snack a day. And by snack, what I mean is an eating event between a main meal. So I mean an eating event that isn't your breakfast, your lunch, your dinner. What we also see is that 25% of our energy, that's a quarter of our calorie intake comes from snacks in the UK and the US. And there's quite similar statistics in many other countries. That's enormous.

**Jonathan Wolf** (3:27)
That's crazy. A quarter of like all the energy I get from my food comes from snacking.

**Sarah Berry** (3:32)
On average, obviously it differs from one person to the other. So let's put in that context of actually how many calories. Let's assume again, the average person consuming 2000 calories a day, that's 500 calories are coming from snacks.

**Jonathan Wolf** (3:46)
So it's almost like that's a fourth meal of the day.

**Sarah Berry** (3:49)
Yes, but often it's spread through multiple eating events. So multiple occasions where we're consuming these snacks.

**Jonathan Wolf** (3:56)
And what are the most common snacks in like the US and the UK?

**Sarah Berry** (4:01)
So they differ from every country. So in the UK, the most common snacks are more sweet based snacks. So cakes, you know, confectionary biscuits or cookies and sweets. In the US, the main snack are potato chips, but also again, cookies and candy.

**Jonathan Wolf** (4:19)
So I understand you've been doing this big ZOE snacking study. Can you talk a bit about what you are measuring in that beyond just whether people were snacking?

**Sarah Berry** (4:31)
Yeah, so snacking has actually not been looked at in, I think, as much detail as it should be considering it accounts for a quarter of our calories. And there's actually not many studies out there looking at the impacts of different types of snacks and snacking per se on our health. So we have this very unique cohort at ZOE from our ZOE studies, and we've been able to track what snacks they're having, how many snacks they're having, how much energy comes from these snacks, but also the timing of the snacks. So we've been able to look at three really important features related to snacking. The quality, so how healthy those snacks are, the quantity and the timing of those snacks as well as the frequency. And we've been able to look at how do those different features related to snacking associate with various health outcomes. And the kind of health outcomes we've been looking at are health outcomes like blood pressure, like body weight, like your gut microbiome, your blood fat levels, your cholesterol levels and so many other health related factors.