Snacking is a dangerous yet addictive habit. You find yourself making 1,000 trips to the kitchen every few minutes looking for something to satisfy your palate. In some instances, it may stem from emotional eating, where you eat, because some feelings have overcome you and you feel that eating will help to deal with them. Other times, you use snacking as a passive activity while watching TV or listening to music. Whatever the case, snacking is not good for you.
Here are 4 reasons why snacking is bad for you.
1. Unwanted weight gain
If you are looking to lose or maintain your weight, then you might just want to stop snacking. What tends to happen is that snacks don’t have satiety value, so every few minutes you feel hungry and ran back to the kitchen to refill. Frequent snacking is likely to take you over your daily calorie budget and result in excess weight, especially if you eat energy-dense snacks or your servings are large.
You may have heard some people hop onto snacking in order to lose weight. Advocates argue snacks can curb appetite, stabilize blood sugar, and help you eat less during a subsequent meal. This is ineffective. Nutrition, fitness, and mindset expert J.J Virgin says that snacking keeps insulin levels elevated, which makes your body more readily store fat.
2. Can cause tooth decay
Eating frequently is not good for your oral hygiene. It increases the risk of tooth decay. How? When your teeth come in contact with food more often, the bacteria in plaque have more time to produce enamel-damaging acids. To add on to that, sticky foods, or those that leave food particles between teeth, take longer to dissolve and therefore fuel acid production for significantly longer. This may result in tooth decay, which causes cavities or enamel erosion.
Snacking continuously means your mouth is mostly in an acidic environment. While saliva may help to neutralize the effects of the acid once we finish eating, snacking too often can overwhelm your teeth, making it more likely for you to experience tooth decay and develop cavities.
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3. May lead to heart disease
Heart diseases have become extremely common in our world today, partly because of our poor lifestyle choices. Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) refer to all the disorders that occur in the heart and blood vessels. Snacking has been associated with some of these heart / cardiovascular diseases. Researchers found that eating starchy snacks high in white potato or other starches after any meal may increase your risk of getting heart disease.
4. Cause inflammation
You are what you eat, and in many instances, the nutritional component found in snacks is not healthy. That aside, snacking may cause inflammation. How does this happen? Eating triggers an immune response in the body.
The act of eating each meal imparts a degree of physiological stress on the immune system. For people snacking around the clock, their bodies can often end up in a near-constant inflammatory state. This persistent inflammation inflicts recurrent collateral damage on our body that is extremely detrimental to our health over time and can cause Type I Diabetes.
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