Use of nutrient profiling to identify healthy versus unhealthy snack foods and whether they can be part of a healthy menu plan

Abstract

Snacking (eating between meals) is a common behaviour, which is often blamed for poor diets because snack foods can be high in sodium, fat and sugar. In addition, uncompensated calories from snacking could contribute to overweight and obesity. However, the evidence is inconclusive, and to some extent this could be explained by the lack of a universal definition as to what counts as a snack. The present study looks at snack foods as defined by USDA in the LanguaL Thesaurus, and evaluated their nutritional quality using the Nutrient Balance Concept. It also explored whether these USDA-defined snacks could be incorporated into a healthy menu plan (US MyPlate). The results of this study showed that only about a sixth are high in nutrients considered as potentially harmful for human health when consumed in high amounts. By contrast almost three-quarters of these snack foods are poor in nutrients that are considered essential (or very important) for human health. However, overall diet quality, assessed using the Nutrient Balance Concept, was compromised only by those snack foods that are especially high in sodium and/or saturated fatty acids.