Old Mother Hen says "Don't eat between meals!"
This "eat lots of small meals all day" business? For the birds! Three meals a day is plenty - just like your mom (or grandma) used to
say. Even fewer might be better. Think insulin and saliva, i.e. weight
and teeth.
First insulin. When you eat, your pancreas sends out a surge of insulin to take care of the glucose in your blood. Insulin tells your body to store sugars as fats. The more insulin you send through your bloodstream, the more fat your body wants to keep on hand.
If you go several hours between meals, you have a chance to switch from insulin-propelled fat storage to fat burning. This is normal and healthy, and the fat is after all there to be burned as fuel.
If your insulin levels never drop, i.e. because you are eating every two or three hours, then you stay in fat storage mode and never let your body access those stored calories. That makes it much harder to lose weight or even just to avoid gaining. (Of course, some sources claiming that eating just one meal a day causes high insulin levels. Not sure how that works, but it buys into what fasting proponents consider the myths of fasting and a misunderstanding of the thermic effect of food.)
Lots of experts insist that if you go too long between meals, you will get so hungry that you will lose all self-control and wolf down anything in sight in huge quantities. OMH wonders if there is empirical evidence to support that claim. There is certainly evidence contradicting it. ("We conclude that increasing MF does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.") Nutritionists are now suggesting that there is no good evidence to support the recommendation of several small meals a day, and point out that that practice specifically curtails fasting duration - and fasting has benefits for most healthy patients. Frequent meals also apparently cause higher levels of inflammation.
Certainly plenty of people manage to skip meals all the time without turning into ravening barbarians. Muslims fast every day for a month every year. Christians and Jews have traditionally followed fasting protocols without ill effect, and without losing all self-control. Skipping breakfast is not bad for weight loss, and in fact that it can HELP people lose weight.
Second, saliva. Saliva remineralizes tooth enamel. Right after eating, mouth pH drops, and acidic environments cause demineralization. Snacking throughout the day is particularly bad for teeth because it keeps the mouth acidic for long periods. It takes a good two hours after eating for the mouth to restore the enamel after eating or drinking.
Constant snacking = environment that contributes to tooth decay.
Why, oh why, then, do the "experts" tell us to eat all the darn time? Why are preschoolers issued permanent snack cups and sippy cups? Why do first graders get a mid-morning snack before their 11:00 lunch? Why do dieticians insist that "grazing" was the way we were "designed to eat"
? (Designed? By whom?)
OMH wishes she knew. Could it be big sugar, big food, and the nefarious conspiracy to get people to eat lots and lots of carbs? Mebbe. What is certainly true is that people do not have to eat all the time, and they certainly don't need lots of carbs to "keep up their blood sugar."
Grandma knew what she was talking about.
