What are Air Foods?

Air foods are typically foods that are low in calories, which fill up our tummies but offer little sustenance. Think popcorn, rice cakes, celery sticks and diet coke!

I don’t want to demonise air foods. Indeed, as with all foods, they have a place. However, I also want to highlight how reliance on these foods can backfire! In line with the Intuitive Eating literature, I’m a true believer in honouring my hunger, i.e. eating when I begin to feel hungry, but I can’t always control when that hunger might crop up and if it fits with "life”, for example when dinner with friends is at 8:30 pm but you’re hungry at 7 pm, or brunch is at 11 am but you’re hungry at 9:30 am. Air foods are great for if we know we might be eating soonish, but need something light to tied us over for an hour or so.

BUT! What about when we’re actually quite hungry and it’s 2 or 3 hours until we’ll eat again? Failing to honour our hunger, or simply numbing it with air food, means it will likely reappear quickly, causing us to feel frustrated or guilty for feeling hungry again so soon. We’ve come to pathologise feeling hungry, but actually, if we’ve only answered hunger with a bag of popcorn, it’s no wonder hunger reappears sooner than if we’d picked a genuinely sustaining snack.

The low-calorie snack market is booming, and it profits off our desire to restrict caloric intake in the quest to keep ourselves trim and “healthy”. But do low-calorie snacks like air foods actually work to do this, or do they actually pacify hunger in the short term and cause us to eat more later on?

This is another one of the reasons the government’s 100 kcal snacks campaign is so frustrating to me. What message is this giving children? That we should equate how healthy a food item is with the number of calories? 100 kcal snacks don’t tend to be satiating, and 100 kcals of nuts is very different from 100 kcals of sweets. I’m not sure this is really the best way forward.

To conclude, air foods aren’t “bad,” who doesn’t love the salty-sweet crunch of popcorn at the cinema. That said, be cautious about filling up on air foods which not sustain us for very long.

Personally, in my day-to-day, I try to include snacks that have a balance of protein and carbohydrate or fat and carbohydrate because I find these tend to be the most satiating and satisfying. For example, toast with peanut butter and banana, or yoghurt with berries and nut butter. This is by no means a rule however, sometimes I will see a cake or a brownie and just feel like it, and that’s ok.