Tufts University. US: The average american kid snacks about three times a day,
totaling about a third of his daily calorie count. But whether those
snacks are good choices has a lot to do with the child’s age, according
to a new study.
E. Whitney Evans, Ph.D., N13, and colleagues at the Friedman School asked
176 students at four Boston-area schools on two separate occasions to recall
what they had eaten the previous day. The researchers then assessed the nutritional
quality of each meal or snack and scored them based on the Healthy
Eating Index (HEI), which measures how closely the diet adheres to the Dietary
Guidelines for Americans.
Evans, who did the research under the guidance of senior author Aviva Must,
Ph.D., N87, N92, professor and chair of the Department of Public Health and
Community Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine, found that the younger
children—the 9- to 11-year-olds—increased their HEI score with each meal
or snack they consumed. Not so with the adolescents: while eating three meals
a day contributed to the overall quality of their diets, the 12- to 15-year-olds
brought the average healthiness of their daily diets down with each betweenmeal
nosh.
The authors speculate that the adolescents may be making more of their own
food decisions, particularly at snack time, than their younger peers.
Evans, who is now a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University and the
Weight Control and Diabetes Center at Miriam Hospital in Rhode Island, suggests
that parents cement good snacking habits when kids are young and reinforce them
when kids reach middle school. That way, when their allowance is burning a hole
in their pocket, maybe they’ll be thinking fruit and yogurt, not chips and fries.