Healthy Food Choices: Snacks

Snack foods are often eaten between meals to maintain energy levels. Try using some tips for buying snack foods in this healthy shopping video.

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Can be part of healthy diet
Find quality snacks
Try fruit juices & beverages
Bagels & cereals

About this Author

Michelle Cooper has been a registered dietician for more than 10 years. She currently works for the state of North Carolina for the New Hanover County School District in the Child Nutrition Department as the supervising registered dietician on staff. She specializes in child nutrition, child fitness and overall child health. She enjoys her job because it allows her to be a pivotal piece of child development.

MICHELLE COOPER: Next, we're going to talk snacks. Snacks should and can be used as part of a healthy diet. It's hard to get all the nutrients that you need with three meals a day and it's not always healthy. Therefore, instead of eating three large meals, it might be better to have three small meals and three small snacks in between. What's important is not the quantity or how often you eat the snack but the quality of the snack. It's okay to have something like baked chips, just make sure that when you dip them you're using something like salsa which is low in fat and high in nutrients instead of using something like a queso or a cheese dip which is high in fat and low in nutrients. Also, it's okay to incorporate something like this low beverage fruit juice as part of your snack that way you're incorporating some vitamins that you get from orange juice, for example, you would be getting from your low-calorie fruit juice. Some other good snacks to incorporate in between meals are something like a bowl of high-fiber cereal with skim milk. And if you want to add a little bit of extra potassium or some extra vitamins to that, you can slice a little bit of a banana to put on top. Another healthy snack would be a whole wheat bagel with a light spread such as Neufchatel cheese, light peanut butter. So, as far as healthy meals go, it's okay to have your snacks in between your meals, just not calorically dense, high in fat, and you want to keep it so that you're getting most of your nutrients that you need from your meals but you're supplementing that with your added snacks which is staving off hunger so you don't overeat when you do sit down at the dinner table. So, remember one, pick healthy, nutritious snacks, make sure they're not calorically dense and try to find ones that are high in fiber or to tie you over until you get your next full meal.

Healthy Food Choices: Snacks Video

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