The Importance of Snacking
We all know that diet and lifestyle are super important and have a huge influence on our health and happiness, but where do snacks come into this? Healthy snacks are a great addition to any healthy lifestyle to help optimise nutrition and provide satisfaction between meals! Forget guilty pleasure, there’s no guilt in snacking as long as you choose the right foods! Read on to discover more about the benefits of healthy snacking.
Snacks: Guilty Pleasure or Nutritional Powerhouse?
Over the years, snacks have been dubbed a guilty pleasure and undeservedly given a bad reputation. Snacks by their very nature should be ready-made, ready-to-eat and convenient and compact enough to transport. Because of this, many of the foods we think of when hearing the word snack conjure up images of unhealthier choices – crisps and chocolate we are looking at you!
But in more recent times, the snack has been reinvented in light of our greater understanding of the impact of diet on health. Over the past decade we’ve seen sweets and treats removed and replaced with healthier snack options, saving the less-healthy foods for an occasional treat. So, in answer to the above question a snack can be a guilty pleasure or a nutritional powerhouse – it all depends on which snacks you choose!
The Amazing Benefits of Healthy Snacking
A healthy snack should be natural, low in sugar, made using 100% natural, real food ingredients and free from any hidden nasties such as artificial colours and flavourings. Choosing a healthy snack follows the same common-sense approach as choosing a healthy meal – so if it has an ingredients list as long as your arm you should probably look elsewhere!
Once you’ve ticked all of these boxes and found the right food for you, incorporating healthy snacks into your everyday has several key benefits. Here’s just some of our favourites…
1. Helps to Boost Metabolism
Eating little and often and avoiding going for long periods of time with no food helps to boost your metabolism. So, a healthy snack between meals can help to keep your engine running as efficiently as possible – instead of becoming sluggish and dormant!
Boosting your metabolism increases something called your metabolic rate, the speed at which you burn calories. This means that snacking can be a really useful tool for those looking to lose weight – contrary to conventional wisdom which would suggest cutting out snacks!
2. Fuel Your Movement
In the modern world of hustle and bustle the working week is all go – and keeping busy physically and mentally requires a source of fuel. Choosing healthy snacks between meals tops up your energy levels and helps to fuel your hectic lifestyle.
Whether your movement is an incidental consequence of a busy day or a planned workout, snacking between meals ensures a constant source of energy that can fuel your exercise and keep you going further for longer.
3. Help to Banish Cravings
We all get cravings, whether we’re on a diet or not. They come when we haven’t eaten in a while and so our innate survival mode craves the most energy-dense foods – to get the most calories as quickly as possible. That’s why we crave chocolate and not cucumbers! Having snacks between meals can help to banish cravings before they hit.
Snacking not only reduces the time we go without eating but it also gives you nutrients between meals that will keep you energised and satisfied. When it comes to choosing that meal later in the day, you’re more likely to pick a healthier option if you’re not starving hungry! That’s just another reason why snacks should be added to your day – not avoided.
4. Optimise Nutrition
Our bodies are clever machines, they tell us when we’re hungry and thirsty so that we get the hydration and nutrition we need every day. But snacking on sugar-laden foods and slurping fizzy pop can confuse the body – we get the energy we need from calories and so are full and satisfied but we don’t get any of the vitamins, minerals, protein or healthy fat that we need to stay healthy.
Adding healthy snacks between meals tops up your levels of key nutrients throughout the day, helping to bridge the gap between diet and requirements and so optimise nutritional status.
5. They Taste Great!
Last but certainly not least, healthy snacks can – and should – taste amazing! When we created our range of healthy seed-based snacks we vowed to never compromise on taste and satisfaction. Using the finest ingredients and tailored recipes means that our snacks taste as good as they are for you!
So, if a healthy snack can tick all the boxes on taste, nutrition and healthful benefits – there’s really no reason to go for anything less than healthy when it comes to snacking.
There are loads of wonderful plant-based snacks you can make yourself but when convenience and quickness call, we’ve done the hard work for you and have created healthy snacks which are ready to go! You can learn more about Pep & Lekker seed-based snacks on our website here.