Snacks and Childhood Obesity

When it comes to fighting childhood obesity, it might not be the meals they eat we need to worry about, but the snacks.

Because as much as kids as snacking these days, it's almost like they are constantly eating , and that's the problem. Just about everyone's heard it by now, childhood obesity is a continuing problem and experts point to plenty of reasons why it's happening and how to fix it. But this new group of researchers has found the amount of snacking kids do during the day can be part of it. After looking at the eating habits of over thirty thousand children they found a large amount of snacking---meaning foods eaten outside of regular meals. On the average, the kids in the study ended up snacking around three times per day and this snacking totaled over one fourth of the calories they eat in a given day. And the main choice?---salty snacks and sweets.

Although this might only add around 100 calories a day to their diet, if you think about that's over 35,000 extra calories a year. That can pile on the pounds. So you best bet is to get rid of the tempting snacks in your pantry and think twice about what you put in their lunch. An occasional snack every now and then isn't necessarily bad, you just want to make sure they aren't eating something all day long.