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Comment by dustedcodes | Hacker News Reader

Although new studies are always interesting to some extent I find it extremely surprising how some people are still very surprised by things which we already knew for a very long time.

Since I was a wee boy I remember being told that the healthiest eating pattern is a substantial breakfast, a warm lunch and a light dinner and you shouldn’t eat before going to sleep, just like you shouldn’t eat before heavy exercise or going swimming. There are numerous health benefits to this and they have all been talked to death so why are we still researching something that we already have the answers to?

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"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was created by a marketing campaign for Grape Nuts. Doing research into it seems like a very good idea, rather than just trusting "intuition", especially if it may just be an echo of that marketing message and not biological evidence.

https://bettermarketing.pub/how-marketing-created-the-most-i...

Nutrition research is hard, mostly reliant on self-reported or animal studies, and the quality has been low. I am happy to have more repeatable and ethical research done to help better understand what really drives our biological systems.

I recall when I was younger, I used to deliberately follow this advice - "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." However, it looks like having a "big" breakfast doesn't make any difference unlike what the traditional wisdom suggests.

From the linked article:

If you try to eat earlier in the day, making breakfast your biggest daily meal may not be so important, suggests another study, published in Cell Metabolism last month. Researchers had 30 subjects who were overweight follow two four-week diets: one with 45% of the day's calories in the morning, the other with 45% of the day's calories at dinner.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the University of Surrey in England had expected those who had a big breakfast and small dinner would burn more calories and lose more weight. Instead, they found no differences in subjects after they followed the two meal patterns.

Our corner of the world also has a similar saying: "Keep the breakfast for yourself, give half the lunch to your enemy, and let them have the dinner."

However I have a sneaking suspicion this grew out of generations of peasants who needed almost 5 digit daily calories early in the day to sustain their backbreaking farm labor, and helped along by moralizing against lazy people who would get the village in trouble with the local lord or the imperial tax collectors.

That’s interesting! I see how the manual labor will require higher caloric intake in the morning.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of ages doesn't qualify as science. I'm not agreeing with that, only explaining how are modern paradigm is anything but humble.

Another example is cultures with rituals involving psychedelics. Western-based values dismissed those practices. Until now. Now we have Western-based "proof" of the usefulness of mind-altering substances.

If anything seems to "defy" science, it is really just that it concurs with it or hasn't yet been scrutinized by it. Those examples are also the few that survive to the current day - much like "all the music in the 70s was good." No it wasn't, most of it was terrible, and thus no one bothers to remember it.

And re: Western values, there is indeed some circumstantial entanglement with science, but they're not one and the same. If humanity got wiped out tomorrow, the next intelligent cultures to evolve after us would discover science again. They would not discover any of our religions, customs, or values.

It's very worthwhile to recognize these facts, and it has nothing to do with hubris or humility. Science is discovery, not a personal trait or belief system.

> Science is discovery, not a personal trait or belief system.

Science the theory? Yes.

However, in reality science is practiced by flawed and biased humans. Humans that are influenced by the nature of their context. And then the proof is measured against that paradigm.

Slightly off topic, I listened to this yesterday

"Lera Boroditsky. She studies how the structure of the languages we speak can change the way we see the world."

The point being, science - which depends on language - in practice isn't immune to influence.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/watch-your-mouth/

A warm lunch? How does temperature have anything to do with it?

It's more about cold dinner. Theory is you are more likely to over eat a warm meal.

So if you are going to keep to having a warm meal a day. Make it lunch.

> Theory is you are more likely to over eat a warm meal.

Eating all your meals cold might be a reasonable approach to weight loss. Wait, did I just invent a new diet fad?

Your body covers the energy overhead to break down food into usable energy supply, ideally ending with a net positive. Warmer food presumably makes the digestion a little less costly. Cooked meat is definitely more rewarding (energy-wise) than raw meat (because it costs less to digest), so maybe warm food is a heuristic for cooked food as well.

Even if we know something to be true, proving it to be true is often the first step in answering “why”.

Once we can prove it, we can test it and experimentally isolate the key components. This is, for example, how willow bark lead to aspirin.

Activity after eating puts the sugars in your muscles rather than your fat cells right? Or no?

No. Having enough energy in your body speeds recovery, which eating helps with, but storing vs burning fat is almost purely down to calories in vs calories out. You can end up storing less fat by using energy to recover (intentional) damage to your muscles, or by just spending it (increase calories out) but that equation is still all that decides which way the valve flows.

That makes sense, burning is what makes a difference. I was just under the impression that some glucose is put in your muscles for ready use, to push your "cliff" further out, rather than being stored in the same cells that would take them if you were to be sedentary.

Glucose is stored as glycogen in the liver/muscles and is used during intense exercise afaik. So you might be right

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