The Dangers of Eating Late at Night
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This was the first thing that struck me when I first moved here. Portions for all kinds of food from ice-cream, to coffee are huge. Why are huge portions such a common thing here?
There are also some other cultural differences. Eating out is far more common amongst similar peer groups (comparing US and UK). Additionally Americans seem less able/willing to cook, despite the amusing amount of "food porn" TV channels and shows. That also ties in with the doggie bag - the idea being that the meal served is for more than one meal, taking the difference home for eating at another time thereby avoiding having to cook later.
At restaurants, however, there is very good incentive to provide large portions. A restaurant has fixed portions that need to feed everyone from small children to gigantic football players. Without the large portions, many larger people would feel unsatisfied and not come back/give the restaurant a bad rating. Because costs are marginal it makes perfect sense that restaurants would have large portions. I've also noticed that there is a general fear of running out of food at social gatherings such as parties. Generally two to three times the amount is ordered. I'm sure this type of thinking is pretty common though this might be more of an American attitude (I don't really know).
None of these places have anywhere near the same portion sizes.
I went to a social xmas party a few years back, and the rule was "you have to bring a dish to share". No one brings enough to just share with just one other person - everyone brings a dish/item that serves at least 4 people. We had a gathering of about 30 people and enough food to serve 150.
They changed the rule the next year (I think that was the first and only year they tried that rule, IIRC).
Dealing with virtually unlimited quantities of food is a very recent problem, and Americans were the first to have this problem at scale.
Most of the rest of the world now has this problem too. If you look at overweight trends, most developed countries are about were America was 30 years ago [1].
There are other differences as well. For one, America was the first country with ubiquitous car ownership--contributing to lower population density and less walking, more time sitting, and drive through restaurants.
[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-world-is-fa...
While other countries can now afford to overeat as easily as we can, they've been able to do so for a lot less time. Again the charts for percentage of the population that is overweight and obese back up this hypothesis--other developed countries are trailing behind the US by about 30 years. They have just had less time to make a habit out of over-consumption.
Also, most other developed countries still haven't caught up to the US in terms of affordable overeating. In PPP terms the US ranks 10 in GDP per capita, higher than every other major economy and higher than almost all of Europe by a very significant margin.
[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/our-research...
recent studies compared obesity levels of immigrants from mexico - you see a huge spike once they're settled in the US.
the direct correlation between poverty and obesity in the US is driven by that. cheap, sugar and fat rich food with huge portions. "i didn't work my ass off to eat a fucking salad".
Or perhaps, people with childhood food insecurities and a habit of gorging what's available, when it's available, as quickly as possible will probably eat more of worse food when given the chance.
i didn't work my ass off to eat a fucking salad
... which is amusing, given that the extremely affluent classes consume well produced salads with quality ingredients as main meals, even in the face of significant choice.
Particularly 3 and 4: Take a nap after eating. Eat late in the day. Probably #1 too about skipping breakfast.
If you want to go completely extreme, intermittent fasting only allows you to eat within a limited window (e.g. 6-8 hours). Lots more research has been done on that but the pressures of conforming to traditional meal timings especially via social occasions can be difficult.
Actually - skipping breakfast helps you keep your insulin low and promotes lean body mass.
Your body is in prime fat burning mode in the morning and holding off on breakfast (and spiking the blood sugar / insulin levels) can help you keep burning fat through mid-morning.
The point is that maintaining lower insulin levels promotes your body using its fat storage rather than food.
Yes, you will eventually eat and that spike will happen, but it's not going to be demonstrably higher of a spike because you fasted.
So then the issue really at hand isn't eating time, it's portion size.
Spanish portions can be huge. A paella "starter" could feed 2 people for a main course. UK portions sizes are growing, too. My Slovenian friend says they have huge portions in Slovenia, where quantity is valued over quality.
It's very hard to generalise about Europe and its ~600 million inhabitants.
Also it comes with the huge caveat that it's only true for those in the USA with their poor impulse control and huge portions.
It would be good to apply "Nakedrobot2's law of nutrition articles" which states that they are ALL A BUNCH OF LIES :-)
My personal anecdotes relating to this are as follows. I have had serious acid reflux for years. It is generally the "silent" type and one of the main symptoms I have is asthma, especially night-time or sleeping-time asthma, triggered by the reflux.
I have tried various diets, including abstaining from caffeine, anything that could possibly contain wheat or trigger a wheat sensitivity, Atkins, fasting. None of those changes make my acid reflux or other related symptoms go away. I have also done experiments with strictly reducing my intake of food and drinks after certain times of day. This was also ineffective.
What does seem to help, to some limited degree, is taking large doses of acid reducer pills, and staying as upright as possible while sleeping.
Also, when I had a TIF surgery to repair my minor hernia and supposedly eliminate the reflux, it was significantly reduced, but never went away completely. And unfortunately after a few months I must have done something to undo much of that surgery because it is probably almost back as much as it was before. And I know my sliding hiatal hernia is back.
While I agree, I'd still consider contributing lifestyle factors after addressing structural, physiological, and so forth.
Though my diseases cannot be cured by better nutrition, its certainly helped. To my surprise and delight.
My doctor prescribed a truckload of antiacids and proton-pump inhibitors for me, until they stopped working. Then, as a new year's resolution, I decided to stop eating potato chips... after avoiding them for about 3 weeks, the acid reflux completely went away. Whether it was because of all the salt, or the oil, I don't know, but it solved it for me. Give it a try!
Fries are the first thing to cut from the diet to stop reflux, along with chocolate, soda, alcohol, coffee, milk and it's derivates.
Of course, I also know what kind of food or drinks I shall avoid in order not to get acid reflux, so I always try to avoid getting it in first place.
Now I have an under-counter water filter and all our drinking water has a significant amount of the chlorine filtered out. It made a huge difference for me. YMMV, and of course doesn't mean much for well water.
This is the basis for an elimination diet, which is key to discovering food sensitivities.
Seriously...
"...two bottles of good red wine for the table [...] her reflux was serious..."
Too much food and drink is bad for you. that's all.
Conveniently, I don't really like them.
An appeal to nature is a terrible line of reasoning that underlies way too many diets I hear friends promoting these days. The usual implied or explicitly stated premise is that there was some time and place of peak human fitness in the distant past, brought about by evolution, and we should return to the diet of that time and place and apply scientific methods to improve upon that diet.
There are at least 3 huge flaws in using evolutionary arguments to base modern diets on what humans ate thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Let's start with the flawed premise that after the explosion in variety of foods available when we learned to domesticate both animals and plants, that evolution rapidly converged within a few thousand years the human body to be optimally tuned for all of the foods available at whatever time the diet's creator has chosen. (1) A human at the global optimum for a given diet does not imply that the diet is a global optimum for the human. (The implication arrow goes the other way. Evolution has not optimized plants and animals to be the most fit food source for humans.) (2) Evolution tends to converge to pretty good working solutions, not optimal solutions. (3) There hasn't been enough time since human domestication of animals and plants for evolution to produce more than a hand full of adaptations.
The only two human dietary-related beneficial mutations I'm aware of in the past 10-15 thousand years both happened to have arisen in Europe. One is a mutation that makes a high wheat diet less harmful and the other is a mutation that causes toleration of lactose late into adulthood. The way some people construct diets, they would then start with the premise that people whose ancestors mostly came from Europe should mostly eat wheat and dairy products. The diet creator would then do some reading of dietary studies to scientifically improve the quality of the starting diet to some local maximum based on some set of starting constraints and some limit of research effort. This might actually produce a decent diet with whole grains, yoghurt, and lots of fruits and vegetables added through a healthy dose of hand waving combined with good scientific research.
It would be much better to throw out the flawed starting point. If you're going to pick an arbitrary time and location in human history as a starting point for constructing a diet, don't pick a time and location that had a life expectancy less than half that of modern first-world countries. If I were to design a diet, I would probably look at modern diets in countries with the highest life expectancies or lowest rates of whatever diet-related maladies you're trying to avoid, and scientifically improve the diet from there. I might even try to find a set of countries that had very different diets and yet all ranked highly in my selection criteria and try to find commonalities in their diets as a starting point for designing a diet.
EDIT: I should point out that there are cases where an appeal to nature is a reasonable line of reasoning, but I have never seen such in the context of diet.
It might be interesting to pick a bunch of different starting points and see how much convergence you get, though.
Americans gorge and lie down.
Europeans have fewer cases of reflux than we do, even
though many of them eat late. That’s most likely from
portion control. In France, for example, a serving of
ice cream is typically a single modest scoop, while in
America, it’s often three gargantuan scoops.8:00 breakfast
11:30 2nd breakfast
15:00 Dinner (soup + main)
20:00 Supper (something light like sandwiches or boiled sausages).
I think this and more process food are the reasons why there are 2x more obese people in UK.
FYI: It's called "Chauvihar" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Jainism)
Or just a coincidence/accident.
But you're right, in that many religions do have a ideas that are good for you.
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in the cosmic religion for the future: It trancends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. - Albert Einstein
You should not be so quick to dismiss other traditions.