Twenty-seven percent of US adults are actively working to lose weight, per Gallup’s November 2024 national poll of 1,001 adults — the closest available proxy for dissatisfaction with eating patterns that might motivate adopting a meals-only structure. That figure is the inaction-side proxy shown above. It falls short of a direct regret measure: the meals-only pattern is the minority position in the US, so the question “do you regret not snacking?” is structurally rare, and most adults who restrict to defined meals do so deliberately as a weight-management or blood-sugar strategy rather than as a regret-driven reversal of a prior snacking habit.
On the other side, 25% of US consumers set a food or nutrition- related New Year’s resolution in 2024, per Purdue’s Consumer Food Insights survey of 1,200 US adults — up six percentage points from 2023, with “the majority” planning to limit salty snacks, sugary foods, regular soft drinks and alcohol. That 25% spans many dietary goals, not snacking, so the action-side proxy is the snacking-specific slice: roughly 13-18% of all US adults if “the majority” means about half to two-thirds of those with resolutions, which we set at ~15%. Even that ~15% is prospective intent to cut snacks, not retrospective regret about a snacking habit. The structural backdrop: USDA NHANES 2017-March 2020 data show 95% of US adults snack on a given day, 78% snack multiple times, and among consumers snacks contribute 24% of daily energy and 43% of added sugars. The two figures come from different instruments (Purdue resolution intent vs Gallup active weight-management) and measure different constructs (prospective resolution vs current effort), so any cross-side comparison is approximate.
The meal-frequency question is genuinely contested in the nutrition literature. Bellisle’s 2014 Physiology & Behavior review concludes that snacking neither clearly causes obesity nor clearly prevents it, that eating frequency does not independently predict body weight when total energy intake is controlled, and that the same eating pattern can have different effects depending on food quality and context. That weakens the case for either side carrying strong regret: most US adults snack, most US adults who snack are not measurably worse off for it when energy intake is matched, and the few who reverse to a meals-only pattern do not have unambiguous evidence that their previous behavior caused them measurable harm. The ~12-point gap between the ~15% snacking-resolution share and the 27% active weight-management share is a difference between two weak, non-comparable proxy instruments, not a measured difference in regret. Readers should treat both figures as proxies for different constructs and not read the delta as a precise regret comparison.