Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Regarding the article, I've experimented with a lot of different eating schedules and structures over the years, largely out of idle curiosity to see if it makes a difference. To be perfectly honest, I can't eat three meals a day. My typical day is eating something very light in the late morning, though I skip it a few days a week, and an early-ish dinner. I've kind of arrived there randomly but it suits me. I don't have time in the middle of the day for a Roman-style big lunch even if I wanted to have one.
A big difference between historical eating patterns and now was the lack of massive quantities of refined carbohydrates and sugars in the diet a couple centuries ago. The insulin response to many foods common in modern diets encourages repeated meals. The fact that my diet is typically quite low in refined carbohydrates probably makes it easier for me to eat only one significant meal per day.
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For example, 8 and 10 year old kids used to play free in the streets and come back at home late at night, even in urban areas.
Or, there weren't movies aimed at teenagers and kids (and never-grown-up geeks) like now, until the eighties. All movies were made for everybody.
Two tidbits of freedom-past I learned from a very good article:
She also told me about the government buying her best friend's house (and everyone else's house around there) to demolish them and put I-5 through the city. Before then, the only way from city to city were highways like Route 66, which wound through cities like residential streets.
I'm not sure how our present libertarian population would feel about governments applying eminent domain over thousands of miles of perfectly good farmland and housing.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnpp.usd...
The vast majority of humanity has, historically, eaten a diet comprised primarily of grain, potato and yam. Areas which supported such crops could support a lot of humans, while grazing areas had far lower populations.
It's historical nonsense to claim that a diet comprised primarily of refined carbs is some modern invention.
You are correct by your narrower (and unconventional) definition. Sugar has only been common for a few hundred years.
I've found it easier to maintain my weight, actually put on muscle (combined with other dietary changes needed to add muscle) and also increased my concentration and focus.
What do I do? I have a couple big glasses of water, a cup of coffee or two with heavy cream or butter and that is it until lunch. If I'm not trying to put on muscle I generally eat very low carb and that further gives me more focus and concentration.
Basically, my n=1 experience is quite good and I recommend others experiment with it.
In looking around for healthy diet + exercise patterns for predominantly sedentary lifestyles (such as the HN crowd), there seem to be two main styles: (1) eat 6 small meals a day spaced out over your waking period, and (2) eat only 8 hours a day, and fast for 16, a form of intermittent fasting (IF) as is recommended by Leangains. Having tried both, I find that IF is vastly easier to adhere to, and more importantly, much easier to maintain your weight loss (or muscle gain) goals as you have only so much time in a day to stuff yourself.
In both schemes however, most of your calories are supposed to come post exercise. In my case, this is the traditional "dinner" time, but like the article says, for pre-electricity ages, this meal may very well have been around noon.
Also, I created a simple macro calculator for leangains[2] just last week. It is not finished yet, but at least for me it is useable.
And most importantly, I have constant energy levels throughout the day. With normal-sized meals there's no problems of being sleepy after a meel, just energetic, and the next meal comes sooner than an energy crash.
Also it's proven to be the only way I can get enough calories every day, especially those days when I have boxing practice ...
Interestingly, even research into eating habits (or at least the way the media picks up and reports on it) appears to be culturally biased, because where I live (Western Europe), there's an almost unrelenting stream of experts telling me how bad skipping breakfeast is. Supposedly it will make you fat, tired, weak and eventually even sick.
It's pretty annoying. I haven't been eating breakfast for almost 20 years without any perceived negative health effects, but every time I tell someone about it I get this lecture about how bad it is to not eat breakfast. This point of view is purely based on conjecture repeated from something people have heard before, never out of personal experience. When it comes to food & health, people really are like sheep, nobody really knows anything about it, but everyone has on opinion, and almost all these opinions are the same, based on 'common sense' and lore, not on scientific facts.
Only 10 years ago common sense said 5 glasses of milk a day were healthy, or bread and cheese for lunch. 1/5th of your diet should consist of dairy products. Today everybody thinks differently. Now counting calories is all the hype, but slowly research is starting to tell us that not all calories are the same in the sense that the kinds of food that contain them are digested differently.
tl;dr: I always get a little frustrated when people start telling me what is or isn't 'healthy' because most people are basically mindlessly repeating what someone else told them. Eating breakfast 'because it's healthy' is one of these things.
But yes - all these guesses are the scientific facts as far as we know them. You can complain about nutritional science being absolutely immature and probably highly corrupt, but it's still the best we have, and people who follow it aren't sheep anymore than I am for believing that there are atoms just because I was told so.
Many authors (Nassim Taleb, Michael Pollan) talk about using other measures as heuristics. Pollan says 'would your great-grandmother have recognized it as food?'.
Adopting that one rule beats most modern nutrition advice.
We don't have evidence physics is corrupt. That's why your belief about atoms is reasonable.
The fact that conclusions resulting from 'nutrition science' often seem to contradict, or are found to be completely wrong every few years should be an indication. Today drinking coffee is bad, tomorrow it reduces your risk of getting cancer. Yesterday nuts were bad and will make you fat, today thay aren't that bad after all because the calories they contain mostly leave your body undigested. At one point in time eating eggs more than twice a week was considered bad for you because of the cholesterol they contain, but according to the latest studies they are a 'superfood', and the cholesterol they contain appears to have no relation to blood cholesterol.
The problem with 'nutrition science' (I have to put it between quotes it because I consider it more like religion than science) is that health effects resulting from diet almost exclusively manifest themselves after many many years. This makes it very hard to reliably measure them, not only because it involves tracking large groups of people over a long period of time, who need to stay on a consistent diet, should not move around to much because otherwise other factors around them could affect their health etc.
Research into nutrition health benefits suffers from the same limitations many other epidemiology research suffers. As it turns out, health is correlated to so many other things it is almost impossible to reliably relate health effects to causes. The difference between epidemiologists and 'nutrition scientists' is that the former group directly acknowledges the limitations of their population studies, while 'facts' about nutrition are usually presented as truth, and nobody seems to care to challenge them.
Much of our current 'low fat, high carb' advice stems from the McGovern commission:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Com...
This article provides a good overview:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
There are lots of other things. Nutritional advice on breakfast, for example, is not based on anything more substantial than correlational studies. It ignores the contradictory evidence of traditional eating patterns that avoided breakfast.
I could go on. We're told to eat a low cholesterol diet, for example, even though blood cholesterol is not directly affected by dietary cholesterol in most cases.
I don't have too many supporting links, hopefully someone else can fill the gap. But the cochrane review is a good source of reviews of the state of our evidence.
As far as recognising it as food goes, has there ever been scientific advice in favour of processed foods? This seems like an implicit strawman to me.
Given breakfast's popularity in our society, one would expect that many people who don't have breakfast can't have breakfast - and this is highly correlated with socioeconomic status and poverty, and we've known for a long time that SES is a greater determinant of academic performance than just about any other factor.
In other words, are you sure your study isn't just talking about poor kids not having breakfast, or is it properly controlling for variables?
http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-...
It amazes me how people can selectively present facts to appear intelligent. There was more to the ancient world than just the Romans and Greeks. So even if they didn't eat 3 meals a day I'm pretty sure there were plenty of ancient civilisations that did.
Before you start implying people are trying to "seem clever", maybe check that your indignation hasn't blinded you to the patently bloody obvious.
The original article could have mentioned this but does not.
This article is about BRITONS, i.e. the inhabitants of the British Isles. It's not using Romans as representatives of what PEOPLE did back then, it's using Romans as representatives of what BRITONS did back then.
Historically the Romans had a huge cultural impact on Britain... whereas ancient Jews had none. So why then should this article randomly mention ancient Jewish traditions?
You're complaining about a complete non-issue.
First a light breakfast very early, with a soup. Then around 10 a meat-based light meal after some hard work. Then at 13 lunch, and finally a dinner.