Eating healthy? You could be making one big mistake!

You can spend the day feeling rather pleased with yourself. You have had a sensible breakfast, a colourful lunch and a dinner that contains enough vegetables to make your fridge feel smug. Then, somewhere between finishing work and going to bed, you meet a packet of biscuits. Or crisps. Or that apparently innocent cereal bar that somehow contains enough sugar to qualify as a small dessert. You are not alone. The ZOE PREDICT study found that 95% of people in its UK cohort were snackers, with snacks providing about 24% of their daily energy. So while you may think of a snack as a minor supporting character, it can actually have a surprisingly large role in your diet.

The interesting part is that snacking itself is not necessarily the villain. Researchers found that the quality of your snacks mattered more than simply how often you ate them. In fact, 44% of the people studied had a mismatch between the quality of their main meals and their snacks, while 26% were eating good quality meals but poor quality snacks. In other words, you can carefully construct a virtuous lunch and then quietly dismantle some of that effort at 4pm with a procession of highly processed treats. Dr Sarah Berry, chief scientist at ZOE and a researcher at King’s College London, said that with nearly a quarter of calories coming from snacks, swapping foods such as biscuits, crisps and cakes for options such as fruit and nuts is a simple way to improve your diet.

So what does that mean for you when the afternoon hunger arrives? It means you do not have to ban snacks or sit staring mournfully at an apple while everyone else eats cake. Instead, you can make the snack work a little harder for you. Dr Kate Bermingham, senior nutrition science manager at ZOE and a researcher at King’s College London, advises choosing higher quality foods such as fruit, nuts and seeds.

A handful of nuts or some fruit may not produce quite the same emotional fireworks as a chocolate biscuit, but they are considerably more useful when you are trying not to arrive at dinner feeling as though you could eat the furniture.

The good news is that you do not need to become the sort of person who prepares seventeen perfectly portioned snack boxes every Sunday. You simply need to notice where your diet is doing something slightly contradictory. If your meals are mostly balanced but your snacks are regularly sugary, salty or heavily processed, that is an easy place to make a change.

Keep fruit, nuts or seeds within reach, particularly when you know the afternoon snack attack is coming, and think about snacks as part of your overall diet rather than as a reward for surviving the day. Your meals do not need rescuing from one biscuit, but if that biscuit routinely arrives with three friends, your otherwise sensible diet may have found its weak spot.