Here Are the Winners of the 2020 Men's Health Snack Awards

NOT SURPRISING: One third of Americans admit that they’re snacking more than they were before the pandemic, according to the 2020 Food and Health Survey.

Actually kind of surprising: Most people are maintaining their weight despite this snack bonanza, a 2020 survey from the research firm Hunter found.

You could credit shelter-in-place go-getters who have taken control of their diet by grocery shopping more and dining out less. But some of the kudos should go to snack companies. Really.

Even before the cluster that is COVID-19 hit, consumer demand for healthy snacks had led companies to start making healthier products. (Enter the kale chip.)

Over time, that pipeline of new products aligned with a rise in more nutrition-minded, captains-of- their-kitchens consumers, and whammo, we now find ourselves in the midst of a healthy-snack boom.

All that said, a great-tasting, truly nutritious snack can still be hard to find. For every bag of healthful salmon-skin chips (a real thing), there’s also a box of not-so-healthful Totino’s mozzarella-filled Takis Fuego Bites (also a real thing).

So we crunched and munched our way through the buffet of new healthy-ish snack items. We read their (sometimes bizarrely long) ingredient lists. And we weighed their nutrition numbers.

What makes a snack the "best," anyway? A winning snack contains a decent dose of protein or fiber (ideally both), is lower in calories than other snacks, and has minimal added sugars, if any. We prize short ingredient lists over long ones. And taste is the deciding factor. Even if a snack hits all the nutrition numbers, if it tastes like tree bark, we leave it off the list.

For the purposes of building muscle and feeling full, you want to target a snack that has ten grams of protein and five grams of fiber per serving, says Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D., a Men’s Health nutrition advisor. Rare is the snack that delivers both—so we’ve paired a few of the winners below to help nudge you toward those goals.

The following 20 snacks are not only good for COVID cravings but will still be good long after this damn thing is over.

(Spoiler alert: Better luck next year, Totino’s.)