Should we be eating three meals a day?
bbc.com
bbc.com
I also noticed that the feelings of hunger are very malleable. Everyday hunger seems to be a habit. Once you are used to eating at a certain hour, you will feel hungry as it approaches, then the feeling will disappear again. It takes several days to extinguish that reflex.
Looking at the state of obesity in the richer half of the world today, I wonder if we should promote IF as an alternative to contemporary eating standards. It is not a magic bullet and it may harm people with eating disorders, but the disease burden caused by overeating is an order of magnitude larger.
The real trouble with IF is probably that it is nigh impossible to make money on it. Squaring market economy with less consumption - against vital interests of Coca-Cola, Nestlé etc. - seems to be impossible. It took a lot of effort to reduce prevalence of smoking, even though it smells badly and it is repulsive to non-smokers. We didn't even make a dent in alcoholism. And food is attractive, good smelling and absolutely necessary for our survival.
Humanity seems to be destined for a future of gluttony. I am almost 44. During my life, I have seen children and elderly alike blowing up like balloons. Unlike many "old geezer complaints", this process is measurable and even obvious in plain sight, when you compare older street photographs to the situation today. What an intractable problem we've got ourselves into.
Basically, i'll have only coffee and water until 2pm and then 2 meals before 9pm.
Mental focus and clarity is pretty high and consistent.
Another point of anecdata…
My sweet spot is at a 4-5 hour feeding window — basically two meals with a short break in between.
I don’t get hungry, I feel great, and my numbers are peak or near peak.
One meal a day may be better, but I could never try it long enough to get reliable numbers.
It's why I stopped doing Keto and went with IF. Breakfast is still in my control so I can skip it. But turning down social invitations to eat out because almost all of our food has lots of carbs was unsustainable to me.
It helped that I am not very hungry in the mornings. I experimented with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and apparently I have a small bump in glucose levels immediately after waking up (not anything massive, but definitely noticeable on the graph), which probably means that the body is anticipating some energy consumption and is ready to cover it from internal sources.
I only do IF in terms of eating one main meal a day, i've never intentionally done this, i'm just not a morning person, and lunch always felt optional - However I've noticed quite clearly that even a small sugar-laced high-carb snack will destroy this for the day, e.g if I decide to have a croissant one morning as I occasionally do (not because i'm particularly hungry but because it looks damn tasty), then I have to accept that today i'm going to be more hungry and want to eat more - it's these big sugary carbs outside of meal time that keep everyone's hunger up by switching off ketosis. For comparison, having a few nuts is a much better snack, it doesn't make you more hungry because you are able to continue burning fat afterwards.
Mmmm I'm curious what happens wrt hunger if you eat at random times of the day, never the same.
The problem is that now, with a pandemics of obesity, we cannot just sustain status quo. We need to reverse it towards more health, less obesity. Which means that even going back to just three meals a day may not be enough.
Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants. For 99% of people the key is that simple. Hold individuals accountable for their choices and promote, push, heck subsidize ancient eating standards over industrialized foods on society.
There are many health benefits to movement and our bodies evolved to have it part of our daily routine, but if you want to deal with your weight, it should done through diet. See Exercised by Lieberman:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49358915-exercised
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lieberman
When it comes to weight, diet and exercise seem to minimally correlated.
The older I get the more inconsistencies and instabilities I hear in dieting advice. I'm old enough to remember when fat was the bad guy and sugar was maybe ok
A wide variety in your diet prevents potential harms from chronic exposure - if you eat the same things over long periods you can accumulate unintended adulterants. Your particular genetics might result in chronic inflammation from an otherwise innocent food item.
Diet should be approached as a game with unknowable hazards. Science is continually evolving, and the findings one week can be completely overturned the next, and so on. Your strategy in the diet game should be to imitate success, avoid harmful patterns, and seek variety consistently. One day we will have a thorough model for nutrition and genetics and we can use soylent style customized food.
Meal pacing depends on your lifestyle, what you eat, fitness, and a myriad of other factors. There will be no one size fits all answer - there are too many confounding factors to reach a sensible conclusion except at an individual level.
Someone sedentary has different requirements than an athlete who runs marathons, or a warehouse worker, librarian, or plumber. One big meal might be best for one, while munching all day could be best for another, and their colleagues might find variations more suitable to their context.
One strategy is to go through an elimination experiment- eat nothing but meat, for 2 weeks, and gradually add different foods one per week, keeping a journal of subjective effects, blood pressure, satiety, weight, bowel movements, and so on.
Following a fad diet
There is a huge variation in what our ancestors ate. But modern highly processed food would be alien to all of them - no tribe nor nation on the planet ever sustained themselves on a diet of salami, pizza, French fries and massively sweetened soft drinks.
This is a very recent sea change in nutrition, where I would expect a lot of unknowable hazards to lie.
There's not a whole lot of difference between humans now and humans 100,000 years ago. We have better tools and culture and knowledge, but we're physically identical - swap a baby in either direction and nobody would know the difference.
How? Aren't seed oils better than butter and palm/coconut oils due to their low saturated fat contents (canola oil or sunflower oil for example)
Seed oils are typically high in omega-6 which is bad because there's way too much omega-6 in the modern diet compared to omega-3.
I think you should prioritize adding omega-3s over removing omega-6s.
Maybe canned anchovies or sardines? Not everyone likes them (I do!) and I don't know if they're accessible to you, but they're a great source of omega-3s and are relatively low in mercury.
In fact, seed oils have a negative impact on health. Not only do they radically throw off the omega 6/3 balance, they are also inherently unstable in comparison to saturated fats, and they oxidize quickly. They also produce more toxic byproducts when heated.
The big farm / FDA unholy alliance that resulted in the modern western diet switching to seed oils, only made heart disease worse.
The tide has been turning for a while now, as the research has become more and more solid and obvious, but you still find plenty of farm, governmental, and medical blowhards ignoring the science, and promoting a seed-oil based diet.
The downside I guess is that you always have some proportion of your body's energy working on digestion, which could lower peak performance. And obviously that it takes more time.
But sugar was never OK. That was pseudo-science.
A lot of dietary "information" is pseudo-science. It's not an area we've dedicated a lot of effort into because we came up with a food pyramid one time and that was that.
We're still learning how wrong we are, as is the case in most fields
It feels to me like humanity as a whole hasn't necessarily properly figured all of this out, and might not do that in the near future.
Personally, i've found the advice of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." to be rather sensible and work for me, as far as general wellbeing is concerned. If you don't eat too many processed snacks and can have a bit of exercise daily, then you should be doing pretty decently.
Things like cheese or eggs invigorate me.
Personally it's also kind of why i wouldn't suggest that people go fully vegetarian/vegan either, except for maybe short amounts of time (e.g. should they desire to look into raising awareness, seeing what produce is sold locally etc.), since having a balanced diet can be challenging!
I occasionally get my bloodwork done and my doctor suggests that i should get a bit more vitamin D, as well as perhaps look into other multivitamin supplies during the winters, so i certainly do that (and try to eat more fish and so on).
While human diets can be slightly "experimented" with and various options be explored, i probably should add a disclaimer somewhere that the diets of pets probably shouldn't be - my dogs, for example, enjoy fresh meat pretty regularly as well as whatever the vets recommend.
I'd suggest that it can also depend on where one lives: the "optimal" diets of someone in Egypt, Norway and Australia might all differ as well, due to the different conditions in each place.
That said, it's not like we can't offer some general recommendations for most folk: someone who subsists off of processed foods with plenty of sugar/palm oil in them is unlikely to be that much healthier than someone who has a reasonable amount of vegetables/greens in their meals.
Though the more specific you try to get, the more curious things become: for example, the statement about eating more plant based stuff might have some opponents in the circles of people who are going for a keto diet - while i can't comment on how effective/healthy it is, i find it interesting and worthy of consideration as well.
And as person without kids I wonder what is good enough lifespan anyway if you are happy during it 40, 50 or 60 years? Or has it go to close to 80 or 90?
To expand on the detail-light article, you're not actually "fasting" until 10-12 hours after you've finished digesting the last thing you ate, at which point you're in the "postabsorptive state." During this period, autophagy breaks down damaged cells and encourages regeneration from healthier ones, resulting in reduced inflammation throughout the body, drastically increased blood glucose control, and measurably reduced risks for a number of diseases and common health issues.
The article discusses the logistics of eating schedules, but it's important to note that when it comes to autophagy, it appears that an hour is an hour. Studies into fasting 3 hours per day for one month (84-90 hours total) have roughly the same results as fasting 3-4 consecutive days in one month (72-96 total hours). So it seems that any amount of fasting you can fit into any given day is going to be beneficial. Sticking to some strict schedule may help some people keep to a routine, but it's not necessary, and may actually be detrimental for folks who feel "failure" in missing schedules or not meeting milestones.
For me, the easiest way to maximize fasting hours and still feel full throughout a day, is to eat between 10am-2pm. If I wake up around 8-9am, that's approximately 6-8 hours of fasting and ~175 hours in a month. And as for the meals, I eat a large salad and then whatever else I want in those four hours. It ends up being about 1,500 calories, and at no point during the evening do I feel hungry or even think about eating. It doesn't need to be complicated, and from the research, I feel confident that I'm getting benefits from however many hours of fasting I manage to get.
It's so hard to find data that is useful enough to make intelligent decisions off of. I drink non-caffinated diet Coke nearly every day; is this actually causing my gut issues and possibly depression? The drink itself is one of the bright spots in my dull days, so stopping for an experiment is hard.
It's kind of crazy that such fundamental parts of our society are shaped by advertising and after a couple of generations we all just accept it because it's 'always been like that'.
(Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides. 1135-1404)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfa...
I’ve been traveling for a couple of weeks, and between the jet lag and a busy schedule, I found myself shifting to a late-breakfast-then-early-dinner two meals per day schedule, so the article was timely for me.
It hasn't occurred to me to eat three meals in as long as I can remember. It sounds fun, I love good food, but that would be a binge day. So when I read articles that describe how it's the social norm to eat three meals every day, or hear people making the asumption that just about everyone does that, they sound strange.
I do have snacks as well, but not a large amount and some days I don't eat anything. I'm sure my intake adds up on average, but it's not in the form of three obvious meals. There's no deliberate fasting strategy or anything. No special diet. My meals aren't particularly large either. And I do like food!
I rarely drink sugar drinks so I'm not getting alternative sustenance from that. These days due to Covid isolation I rarely have a cappuccino either - though I used to enjoy those when I went out more, and I guess you could count a milky coffee as a small meal.
I'm overweight with a somewhat rotund figure, btw. That's been true as long as I can remember as well.
3 large meals each day, adds up to a lot of calories, and if you snack and drink: game over.
But, there are a few things we know: It's more important what you eat than how / how much you eat. A home-cooked, balanced plant-based diet is probably the best "life hack" you can do (if you have the time to do it, of course).
Given this, I'm a strong propononet of "listen to your body": Just eat when you feel hungry, as long as you eat healthy things (see above).
Plant based diets are "good" if you are having issues with overeating/overweight and/or a diet lacking vegetables. I guess that's a lot of people, but definitely not everyone.
I switched to this because my usual post-winter diet wasn't effective, and this is.
It gets quite boring after a while, but breaking this once a week with an extra pizza, burger, or whatever, might be the trick to keep this up.
So far I have NOT been able to keep the diet, the discipline is difficult, but from everything I read, eating less results in improved health.
Hot climates vs cold climates, hard manual work vs sitting at a desk.
Given that range I doubt there's any one size fits all "best" regimen.
The inadequately understood influence of solar tides on digestion.
Humour aside, three meals represents the sweet spot for labour to produce edible food in the circumstances we found ourselves in. Grazing would interfere with other necessities of life for most people once some kind of division of labour emerged.
The human body is basically a battery that gets recharged or discharged. A lot of diets are focused around charging your body more slowly instead of discharging it. No wonder they all fail.
Interesting that that's 'science', because that's definitely my experience. I generally have 2 meals a day, skipping breakfast (maybe a late brunch), but if I do for some reason have an early/'normal' breakfast I find I'm really hungry the rest of the day, want an early lunch, want supper at a more normal time (otherwise left to my own devices I shift quite late in the day).
> "In the 1950s breakfast becomes how we recognise it today: cereal and toast. Prior to that we were happy to eat a piece of bread with jam."
An odd quote? Quite a generalised personal preference?
Breakfast went out 20 years ago. Just way too many calories.