The advice that children should eat three meals and two snacks a day is standard pediatric guidance, and several nutrition researchers now say it was built on a food environment that no longer exists.
Their objection is not that snacking is inherently harmful. It is that the studies underpinning the guidance examined children eating whole foods, while the modern American snack is usually something else. American children now snack roughly three times a day, in cars, at practices, in waiting rooms, and most of what they eat during those occasions is ultraprocessed.
