3 simple strategies for healthy snacking

Snacking has long been the enemy of diets and healthy lifestyles. Here are a few tips for snacking without ruining the progress you made by eating healthy otherwise:

In food-industry lingo, energy doesn't mean vim and vigour; it means calories. That's what "energy bars" are.

• They use the imagery of hard-driving athletes who need a quick dose of calories to supply their muscles enough energy to finish the marathon.
• However, there aren't enough marathoners or long-distance cyclists or cross-country skiers to provide the demand to keep all the high-profit energy bars on the shelves.
• Most of them wind up being bought by armchair athletes who eat them instead of lunch or just for snacks.
• Researchers say that most of the bars do contain some ingredients that are good for you (nuts, fruit and oats, for example), held together with goo that makes them taste good.
• As a lunch, energy bars are better than corn chips and soda, but not as good as an apple and a salad.
• If you think you need them during your workout, just be sure you're burning more calories during the workout than you're eating in the bar.
• If, by chance, you are eating these bars because you really do need a shot of calories, then eat the bars slowly, advise experts. One bite every 10 minutes.

Snack chip manufacturers fall all over themselves to entice you with new flavourings, backed up with glitzy advertising campaigns and fancy packaging. Mesquite this, sour-cream-and-onion that.

• What they don't tell you is that such chip flavourings typically come with hefty additional doses of salt — often twice the normal amount.
• Excessive salt can lead to high blood pressure, heart and kidney problems, and bone disorders.
• Save your exotic cravings for fresh foods and keep your chip choices simple.

Are you or your kids engaged in a constant struggle to resist those tantalizing chips, dips and frozen desserts beckoning from the refrigerator and pantry? Here's a simple secret that the junk food manufacturers hope you don't catch on to: once these foods have crossed the threshold of your house, they have already won the battle. Most likely, if you've bought it, you'll eat it. So the place to start just saying "no" is at the store.

• Research shows that proximity is among the factors contributing to our unfortunate tendency to stuff ourselves and get fat.
• If food is easy to get, you're more likely to eat too much of it.
• If you're trying to avoid specific foods or certain kinds of food, keep them out of the house.
• It's not just for you. The person who does the shopping and fixes most of the meals has the most influence over what others in the household eat, according to Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.
• He calls that person the "nutritional gatekeeper."
• Dr. Wansink has found that people make about 248 food decisions every day, many of them without much thought, and that the "gatekeeper" controls 72 percent of those decisions.

Of course, we are always going to "slip up" and have a bag of chips or other unhealthy snack. If you maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle outside of this, these little slips are okay. Use these tips to change up your snacking on a regular basis -- you'll feel a lot better for it!