Everyone has their thoughts on the proper way to snack, and now even science has an opinion.

A new study revealed that snacking isn’t necessarily bad for you — as long as you snack on nutritious foods and avoid doing it late at night.

There has long been debate over whether or not snacking is good for you, and available info on the relationship between snacking and health can be confusingly inconsistent.

In fact, “surprisingly little has been published on snacking, despite the fact that it accounts for 20-25% of energy intake,” Kate Bermingham, a researcher of nutritional science at King’s College London and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Researchers at KCL looked at data from over 1,000 people to determine if snacking affects health and if the quality of the snack matters.

The study was part of the ZOE PREDICT project, a series of large, in-depth nutritional studies designed by personalized nutrition app ZOE.

Participants kept a food diary and wore blood sugar monitors to track their personal snacking habits. This data allowed Bermingham and her team to see the relationship between the quantity, quality and timing of snacking and the snacker’s blood fats and insulin — the latter two both being important ways of measuring heart health and metabolism.

“We observed only weak relationships between snack quality and the remainder of the diet, which highlights snacking as an independent modifiable dietary feature that could be targeted to improve health,” Bermingham said.

Bermingham presented her results on Monday in Boston at Nutrition 2023, an annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition.

Out of those who partook in the study, 95% had at least one snack per day — with an average of 2.28 daily snacks — making up roughly 22% of daily calorie consumption.

Researchers found four categories of snackers, whose bodies reacted differently to snacking: morning snackers (more than half of daily snacks consumed before noon), afternoon snackers (between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m.), evening snackers (after 6 p.m.), and those no distinct snacking pattern — also referred to as “grazers.”

Those who snacked after 9 p.m. had worse blood glucose and fat markers compared to those who snacked during the day, which could be due to the snacks shortening the fasting window between dinner and breakfast and slowing down the process of breaking down and metabolizing food.

While about 17% of participants were classified as “grazers,” one in three were “late evening snackers” — eating the majority of their snacks after 9 p.m.

The study also revealed that the quality of the food one snacks on is more important than quantity or frequency. High-quality snacks tend to have healthier levels of blood glucose and fat levels, as seen with fruits, veggies and nuts.

“Our study showed that the quality of snacking is more important than the quantity or frequency of snacking; thus choosing high-quality snacks over highly processed snacks is likely beneficial,” Bermingham said. “Timing is also important, with late-night snacking being unfavorable for health. This may mean that, universally, snacking late in the evening and interrupting the overnight fasting window is detrimental to health.”