Analysis: Are We Caught In A Snack?

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Are We Caught in a Snack Trap?
If you have been to a children’s museum or really anywhere with children lately I guarantee you have see more than a few kids munching away on some form of snack or another. Children crying out “Can I have a Snack?” and parents digging through diaper bags and backpacks looking for a morsel to calm the savage beast. Over-snacking has become such an engrained part of our culture that parents now days often don’t even notice how out of control it has gotten. Everywhere we look parents are exposed to the reinforcement that kids need snacks to be healthy. Our emails are dinging with requests to bring a snack to sports practices, school parties, girl scouts, field trips the sky is the limit! Strollers and car seats now have snack trays and cup holders. Grocery stores offer up cookies and fruit to children to pacify them while their parent shops. Over-snacking is everywhere and so are the effects
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"The increases [in snacking] that we found between the 1980s and '90s have, if anything, accelerated towards eating more times a day, and we see no evidence that 's going to slow down.”
While it is worrisome that children are eating much more frequently and adding calories to their diets, even more alarming is what they 're actually snacking on. "They are shifting to very low-quality food -- essentially junk food," says Popkin. The study showed that children are consuming less fruit and milk and more salty snacks such as potato chips, as well as more candy, juice and soft drinks. "It 's the worst of both worlds," he says. "We 're getting more calories, and we 're getting them from all the wrong

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