Healthy Snacks Between Meals: 30 Ideas With Calories and Protein per Portion

Does snacking between meals make you gain weight? What the studies say

Snacking is neither good nor bad by definition, and three reviews help put it in perspective. The first looks at frequency: Schoenfeld, Aragon and Krieger (2015) pooled 15 experimental studies that compared eating more or fewer times a day. At first sight, eating more often seemed to improve body composition, but the sensitivity analysis showed that this result depended on a single study, so there is no basis for saying that five or six eating occasions a day "boost your metabolism" or make you lose weight. The second looks at what people snack on: the systematic review by Cooke et al. (2024) analysed 40 publications on discretionary snacks (sweets, pastries, crisps and the like). It found that they may add a little energy to the day and that cross-sectional studies contradict each other, but that longitudinal studies in adults consistently showed a relationship between eating more of these snacks and gaining weight or body mass index. The third looks at the context: Bellisle (2014) describes how, in healthy people of normal weight, snacking seems to help match what they eat to what they need, whereas in others, especially people with obesity, it often provides a lot of energy and little nutrition, and she highlights as key factors choosing very energy-dense foods, eating without hunger and eating while distracted.

High-protein snacks

These are the best fit if you snack because you arrive very hungry at lunch or dinner. In a crossover trial with 20 healthy women (Ortinau et al., 2014), a 160 kcal high-protein yogurt snack reduced afternoon hunger more than a chocolate snack with the same calories, delayed the wish to eat again by about 30 minutes and ended in about 100 fewer kcal at dinner compared with the chocolate; compared with savoury crackers, the differences were not significant. It is a small study, measured on a single afternoon for each snack, so take it as a clue rather than a guarantee. If you want to know how much protein you need per day, the protein calculator estimates it from your weight and your activity level.

Snacks under 100 calories

If what you want is to snack on something without it showing up in your daily total, energy density rules here, that is, the number of calories per gram. With 100 kcal you can eat about 310 g of strawberries, about 190 g of apple or about 26 g of air-popped popcorn, but only about 17 g of almonds or of dark chocolate. None of them is "bad": some fill a plate and others fit in the palm of your hand. The review carried out by the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in the United States (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2012), with 17 studies in adults, concluded that there is strong and consistent evidence that eating patterns with a lower energy density improve weight loss and weight maintenance.

Healthy sweet snacks

For a sweet craving, the most practical options are whole fruit, yogurt with fruit or a pre-measured portion of dark chocolate. Look at the last column: almost all the sweet snacks provide little protein, so if what you feel is real hunger, pair the fruit with yogurt or with a small handful of nuts. If sweet cravings show up more often than you would like, our guide on how to quit sugar has concrete strategies to handle them.

Savoury snacks

Nuts are the most calorie-dense snacks on the list (about 170-200 kcal per 30 g), but that does not make them a problem. In the meta-analysis by Guarneiri and Cooper (2021), with 55 studies in adults who ate nuts every day for more than 3 weeks, body weight did not change, whether or not they were told to replace other foods with them. The practical key is the portion: 30 g is a small handful, and eating from a large bag makes it much harder to know how much you have had. Choose plain or dry-roasted unsalted versions whenever you can.

Snacks to take to work

Away from home, what helps most is having your snack already prepared before you leave. These options keep in your bag or in a desk drawer without a fridge. If there is a fridge at work, add the yogurt, the kefir, the cottage cheese or the hard-boiled eggs from the tables above.

• Prepare the portions at home: small bags of 30 g of nuts or of 20 g of popcorn.
• Bring fruit that survives a day in your bag: an apple, mandarins or a banana.
• If you have a fridge, leave plain yogurts or hard-boiled eggs there for the whole week.
• Before you reach for something, ask yourself whether it is hunger or habit: we explain the difference in emotional hunger vs real hunger.

What to snack on without gaining weight: 5 rules

These guidelines come from the studies above, not from a magic formula:

• Snack when you are hungry, not out of boredom or in front of a screen: eating without hunger and while distracted are two of the factors Bellisle (2014) points to when snacking ends up adding extra calories.
• Prioritise foods with a low energy density, such as fruit, vegetables or plain yogurt. In the study by Rolls et al. (2006), with 24 young women, lowering the energy density of all their meals by 25% for 2 days reduced what they ate by 24% (575 kcal a day), with no differences in their ratings of hunger and fullness.
• If you snack because you are hungry, include protein: in the trial by Ortinau et al. (2014), the high-protein yogurt delayed the wish to eat again by about 30 minutes compared with the chocolate.
• Measure the portion of the most calorie-dense foods (nuts, chocolate, peanut butter): serve them in a bowl instead of eating from the packet.
• Count the snack as part of your day, not separately: the review by Marangoni et al. (2019) stresses that what a snack contains should be assessed together with the diet of the whole day. To find out how many calories you need, use the calorie calculator, and to look up a specific food, the food calorie table.

Which snack has the most protein and the fewest calories?

If you want to feel full with protein while spending few calories, compare the grams of protein per 100 kcal. With the USDA FoodData Central data, the foods in this article rank like this:

What about snacking at night?

The same rules apply at night: if you are genuinely hungry, choose something small and easy to measure, such as a plain yogurt, a kefir, a piece of fruit or a hard-boiled egg, and avoid eating from the packet in front of the television, which is exactly the kind of context in which Bellisle (2014) places the snacking that adds extra calories. If you often go to bed hungry, it may be your dinner that needs a second look. We go through the studies in does eating at night make you gain weight?, and you will find more ideas in satiating foods to avoid hunger.

Keep two or three of these options always within reach, in the fridge, in your bag or in your desk drawer at work, and log what you snack on with Renzy: you will see how much it really adds to your day and whether it brings you closer to your goal or further away from it.