Back in the 1950s when Dr. Kelly Brownell was a young boy, snacking didn’t really exist. “Children ate three meals and maybe one snack,” he says. Maybe if you took a long trip, your parents would make sandwiches to bring along, but that would be about it,” says Brownell, who’s an emeritus professor of psychology at Duke UniversityToday kids’ eating patterns look strikingly different. Children eat, on average, about three snacks a day today, eight nationally representative surveys found. Children eat nearly everywhere they go, and a large portion of their snacks are ultraprocessed foods.