15 Snacks That Actually Fill You Up (Not Just Ones That Sound Healthy)

The snack aisle is full of things that are technically healthy and functionally useless — a rice cake, a fruit-only bar, a low-fat yoghurt. You eat one, you feel briefly virtuous, and you are hungry forty minutes later, which is how a 90-calorie snack becomes a 400-calorie afternoon.

A snack has one job: to hold you until the next meal. That takes protein and fibre. Almost nothing else works.

The formula

At least 10 g of protein, plus fibre or fat. Test any snack against that and the shelf sorts itself.

The list

1. Greek yoghurt with berries. The default. Around 15 g of protein, plus fibre.
2. Cottage cheese on rye crispbread, with black pepper and tomato. Deeply unfashionable; extremely effective.
3. Two boiled eggs. Boil six on Sunday and keep them in the fridge.
4. Apple with peanut butter. Fibre plus fat plus protein. Read the label — peanuts should be the only ingredient.
5. Hummus with carrots, peppers and cucumber.
6. Edamame. Frozen, microwaved, sprinkled with salt. Around 17 g of protein per cup and almost nobody thinks of it.
7. A handful of nuts. About 30 g. Weigh it out once so you know what a handful looks like — most people's is closer to three.
8. Tinned tuna or sardines on wholegrain toast.
9. Roasted chickpeas. Crunchy, cheap, fibre-dense.
10. A protein-rich smoothie — yoghurt or milk, frozen berries, a spoon of oats, nut butter. Not a fruit-only smoothie, which is a drink of sugar.
11. Cheese and an apple. The oldest snack in the book, and still one of the best.
12. Turkey or chicken slices rolled around cucumber. Slightly odd; genuinely filling.
13. Popcorn (air-popped) with a small handful of almonds. Volume plus substance.
14. A wholegrain wrap with hummus and spinach, cut in half.
15. Dark chocolate and a handful of walnuts. A snack you'll actually look forward to, which matters more than people admit.

The ones that fail

• Rice cakes. Air with a glycaemic index. Fine as a vehicle for something else; useless alone.
• Fruit-only bars. Concentrated sugar with a health halo.
• Low-fat flavoured yoghurt. Fat removed, sugar added, satiety destroyed.
• Most "protein" bars. Frequently confectionery with whey isolate added. Check the sugar; some contain more than a chocolate bar.
• Juice and smoothies from a bottle. Liquid calories are poorly registered by appetite regulation. You do not feel like you ate.
• Crisps. Engineered specifically to prevent satiety. That is the product.