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DIET The highest intake of unhealthy snacking is between tea and dinner time
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Tea time to dinner is binge time for snack-lovers. A recent pioneering pan-India study of snacking among women and children by research agency AC Nielsen shows that the highest intake of unhealthy foods such as noodles, chips, namkeen, pastas, biscui
ts/bakery products and a variety of snacks is in the pre-dinner period.
The study “Understanding snacking amongst women and kids” , surveyed 1,000 respondents — 200 each from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata. It covered homemakers, working women (mothers) in the age group of 28-40, and children in the age group 5-12, belonging to middle and upper income households. It covered their daily intake of various foods at regular intervals and found that it was the pre-dinner period between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. when people binge the most.
What do leading nutritionists and dieticians have to say about the study?Dr. Bhuvaneshwari Shankar of Apollo Hospitals said, “The survey results are reflective of the lifestyle in most urban areas in India today. There is a clearly a long gap between tea-time and dinner. This leads to people resorting to unhealthy quick snacks which not only kill their appetite for dinner, but also contribute the most to weight gain and other health related problems such as high cholesterol.”
Dr. Karuna from Apollo Hospitals, New Delhi adds, “Pre-dinner snacking is the result of our fast paced lifestyles.
However, if we make small changes to our eating habits and include easy-to-prepare healthy snacks such as fruit chaats, healthy soups, milk shakes with different fruits, kathi rolls with vegetable, paneer and other stuffing and healthy “bhel” in the evening snack, it can go a long way towards developing a healthy eating pattern.
Dr. Reshmi Rai Choudhary of Aurobindo Hospital, Kolkata says, “More and more young people these days have high cholesterol as they consume fast food laden with trans fats and saturated fats. Also the consumption of vegetables and fruits has come down and since there is very little fibre in the diet, the cholesterol stays in the blood without being eliminated. The gap between tea-time and dinner time can be bridged with healthy snack options such as salads with a low calorie dip, fruits with skin, whole grains as in sprouts, whole wheat bread, high fibre, low sugar biscuits and soups with a lot of veggies thrown in.”
(Source: AC Nielsen Survey)
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