A Recent study conducted at Ohio State University discovered that junk food accounts for up to a quarter of daily calories for American adults, and is also responsible for one-third of their daily sugar.
After analyzing data from surveys of over 20,000 people, researchers recorded that adults consume approximately 400-500 calories a day in snacks that contain little nutritional value. This intake also tended to be more than they consume at breakfast.
“The magnitude of the impact isn’t realized until you actually look at it”, stated senior study author, and professor of medical dietetics at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The Ohio State University, Christopher Taylor.
Taylor reported that “Snacks are contributing a meal’s worth of intake to what we eat without it actually being a meal… You know what dinner is going to be: a protein, a side dish or two. But if you eat a meal of what you eat for snacks, it becomes a completely different scenario of, generally, carbohydrates, sugars, not much protein, not much fruit, not a vegetable. So it’s not a fully well-rounded meal.”
There also appears to be a correlation between certain health conditions and food habits, as survey participants with type two diabetes were found to eat fewer amounts of sugary foods and snack less overall than adults without diabetes or those whose blood sugar levels indicated they were pre-diabetic.
Taylor claimed that “Diabetes education looks like it’s working, but we might need to bump education back to people who are at risk for diabetes and even to people with normal blood glucose levels to start improving dietary behaviors before people develop chronic diseases.”
Rather than focusing on what type of foods are okay to snack on, Taylor suggests that looking at a day’s complete dietary picture and seeing what nutrition snacks will provide, whether they are considered to be junk or healthy, is more important.
“We think about what we’re going to pack for lunch and cook for dinner. But we don’t plan that way for our snacks. So then you’re at the mercy of what’s available in your environment.”
In this sense, perhaps what makes Americans so susceptible to snacks is their accessibility, which comes to an issue of willpower and meal planning, rather than selectively choosing what snacks to eat throughout the day.
These extra calories, and their poor nutritional value, could go far in explaining the epidemic of obesity that is besetting the U.S.
