Is Snacking Making Us Fat?

It’s tough to pinpoint exactly when obesity became an epidemic, even tougher when it comes to childhood obesity, but general consensus within the scientific community points to sometimes in the early 1970s. So what was the turning point? Was there one particular event to trigger the epidemic? Some point to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a government released guideline to what foods we should be eating, released around the time obesity started becoming the norm rather than the exception. Others, like diet guru Jason Fung, claim it has more to do with snacking.

In an article published on Medium, Fung outlines survey results from 1977, which outlined eating habits. Back then, the most people ate were three meals a day: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Comparatively speaking, by 2004 most people were eating six times a day, with some people eating as often as ten times per day.

The problem isn’t an increased quantity of food, per se, but an increase in how many of our waking hours we spend eating. Whereas once breakfast would be at 8:00am, dinner at 6:00pm, and no after-dinner snacks, people now eat well into the late hours of the night or even into the early morning. This, in no small part, is due to snacking. With numerous studies showing that people who stop eating early in the day have better luck with weight loss and weight maintenance thanks to lower insulin levels, it may be time to rethink our snacking habits.

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