I know I should be eating healthier snacks, but can we just admit that carrot sticks are deeply depressing?

OhOver the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing my eating habits. Did I know what was in my food? Was I buying too much takeout? What tempts me the most? This deep dive into what I eat was largely motivated by the conversation and research around ultra-processed foods, which in recent months have become public enemy number one.

I like to think I eat pretty healthily, balancing the occasional bar food and instant noodles (Maggi, I’ll never leave you) with plenty of home-cooked food. After speaking to gut health guru Professor Tim Spector earlier this year for an article, I decided to see how many plants I ate in a week, in line with his advice to eat 30 plants a week. I was proud for a few days after counting 26 plants when Wednesday rolled around.

But despite some positive changes I've made to my diet (such as eating at least one or two types of fruit or vegetables at almost every meal and eating many, many more legumes), there's one thing I can't seem to change. Snacking is still a huge source of pleasure for me, but the thought of eating a raw fruit and nut bar instead of a chocolate treat fills me with sadness.

Take, for example, the five raw fruit and nut bars I took to a festival last week. Past Kate thought, “These will be great. They’ll give me energy and they’re really healthy, so they’ll be a nice respite from all the awful festival food.” Well, present Kate is staring at those same five bars that are still in my fruit bowl today. I keep sneaking glances at them over the top of my laptop screen, hoping they’ll somehow disappear without me having to eat them.

open image in gallery

In contrast, the packet of chocolate-covered digestive biscuits I have in the cupboard barely lasted a week after I bought them. Frozen chocolate-covered fruit snacks are my current obsession. Crisps don't last long in my house, as both my husband and I go through them in record time every time we buy a bag. If a packet of Haribo arrives at our flat, it's over: we fight tooth and nail, or at least I do, to make sure he doesn't eat them all before then.

But if I cut a carrot into sticks to eat as a snack, I feel like I'm punishing myself. The part of my brain that associates food with pleasure simply doesn't see it as rewarding, but rather as boring and depressing. Why would I want to eat a cucumber stick like a turtle when I could dunk a delicious custard biscuit in my tea? Don't even get me started on the abominable rice cakes, which are so dry and flavourless they should be illegal. And anyone who says they enjoy a protein bar (or worse, a protein ball) is lying, I'm convinced of that.

Dr Frankie Phillips, a dietitian at the British Dietetic Association (BDA), tells me that while snacking is part of a normal eating pattern for many people, it's important to think about because We snack between meals, and we snack on what we eat. I wish I could say I snack out of hunger, but if I’m completely honest, most of my snacking is due to boredom. I work from home most days, and I find myself staring at the fridge or my cupboards more often than I’d like to admit, just to get away from the screen for a few minutes.

The BDA recommends that we eat something when we are hungry or before exercise, “not just because the food is there,” says Dr Phillips. She adds: “If there is an unhealthy snack you tend to have, try not to buy it or keep it out of sight. Put something more nutritious in a visible place and you are more likely to enjoy it.” But, as the nuts and raw fruit bars I mentioned earlier and have on display demonstrate, this doesn’t always work. If I find snacks so unappealing, it’s easy to ignore them and search my cupboard for something I actually like.

This isn’t to say that I can’t completely ignore snacks. To the horror of some of my colleagues, it took me about three weeks to eat the chocolate Easter egg my mother-in-law gave me earlier this year. I still have a box of Cadbury Heroes from last Christmas, mostly untouched, gathering dust on my shelf (don’t ask me why it’s there, it just is). I can go several days without craving a snack if I just don’t feel like eating one.

So what does that lead to? Dr. Phillips’ advice is to choose snacks from a variety of food groups that provide valuable nutrients and to plan ahead to make sure I still have healthy snacks when I want them. She also recommends not cutting out “less healthy” snacks altogether, but instead limiting them to “special treats.” I understand that to mean I shouldn’t eat an entire package of cookies in one sitting, which is fine. But maybe the answer lies in understanding why I like certain types of snacks so much. Then I can address this, rather than trying to force myself to eat healthier alternatives.

Earlier this year, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) discovered a circuit in the brains of mice that, when stimulated, pushes them to seek out food even when they’re not hungry. This same circuit also compels mice to prefer foods that are “pleasurable” over healthy. Sounds very familiar to me. Maybe I’m a mouse? Alas, the researchers explained that they believe the circuit “triggers craving for highly rewarding, high-calorie foods.” Since humans have a functionally similar region in the brain stem, they theorize that if the circuit is overactive in a person, they may feel more rewarded by eating or crave specific types of food even when they’re not hungry.

I may not be a mouse, but it does suggest that something in my brain is compelling me to eat chips instead of carrots. I take some comfort in that, but I'm afraid to say that I'm not to blame for being a snack addict. It would be nice to be able to let go of my own snacking habits, but the only person at a disadvantage would be me. So I'll keep trying to find a fruit and nut bar that I actually want to eat, and I'll give carrot bars another chance. But I must beg snack manufacturers to up their game. Please, for the love of God, stop forcing us to gorge ourselves on protein bars – they really do taste like sawdust and sadness. Healthier shouldn't mean unpalatable.