One of the things that has always fascinated me is how much of our culture is a modern affectation rather than being some deep pattern of human behavior. You don't even have to go back a few hundred years; there are things Americans perceive as having been that way forever that did not exist at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of our eating and sleeping habits have been shaped by the Industrial Revolution.
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.
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.
The normal definition of refining grains includes milling and sifting, both of which are ancient. They extend the shelf life of grains, among other benefits.
You are correct by your narrower (and unconventional) definition. Sugar has only been common for a few hundred years.
And neither was sugar as cheap and commonly available as it is today. Honey was more common, and even that was expensive. I don't think your average peasant had sweets very often.
If one divides their calorie needs by three and eats an average of those calories for each meal it isn't hard to get the body asking for three meals a day. Most people don't exercise though and have a slow metabolism.
My mother told me about getting the first TV in their neighborhood in the 1950s -- people were standing on their porch, staring in, trying to figure out what the hell the bright loud box was. Before that, they got their news from the movies and papers. Some newsreels went on until the 1970s, as seen in MASH.
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.
I've seen more and more research on the benefits of fasting and skipping breakfast. I've actually not eaten breakfast in over 3 years and I have to say, I actually prefer not eating it. It took some time to adapt, but once I did, I actually felt better.
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.
[quote]I've seen more and more research on the benefits of fasting and skipping breakfast[/quote]
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.
If a science is corrupt, it can be worse than useless. Scientific 'authority' is potentially as dangerous as other types of authority, if it isn't based on the scientific method.
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.
I haven't known my great-grandmother much, but my grandmother lives on a typical German diet of eating as many greasy potatoes and meat as you can get, and like a good grandmother, she loves cake. She is doing okay because she exercises a lot, but tbh, many people of her generation are fat and sick on the same diet - all from natural "slow food".
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.
>> What evidence do you have that nutrition science is corrupt and not based on the scientific method?
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.
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.
And many of those scientific facts are facts for only limited group of people, based on combination of various genetic, age/lifestyle related and environmental factors.
Firstly, citation required. We need to know how rigorous the study was and whether or not it controlled for other factors such as SES.
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?
There's a new movement on the horizon called "I'm not hungry." Why don't you have breakfast? I'm not hungry. Why don't you have lunch? I'm still not hungry. Hunger shouldn't always drive the need to eat.
What you're speaking about seems similar to what most people on the Leangains [1] diet follow.
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.
Personally I've discovered that 5 small-ish meals spread out over the day works really well. It's a bit annoying because I have to eat every three hours, but I've dropped fat without dropping (even gaining) weight and feel much better than I used to.
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 ...
I know some people skip breakfast altogether and I am unable to say whether this is good or bad for your body, but there is an indication/correlation that people who skip breakfast tend to have a higher incidence of diabetes. I think it is not proven whether it is a causal effect or not, just observational. So it may be caused by other factors.
Jews have codified three meals a day as part of the celebration of religious days (e.g. the sabbath) since the beginning of their religion. Going to the extreme of staying someone who does not prepare for three meals has no portion in the afterlife. At the same time they were critical of gluttony.
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.
Calm down there Hulkomania, this article is very clearly written from the perspective of the British Isles, and the Romans were kinda a big deal there.
Before you start implying people are trying to "seem clever", maybe check that your indignation hasn't blinded you to the patently bloody obvious.
Sure, but (a) the Romans were quite a big deal to the Jews as "Judea" was part of the Roman Empire and (b) it's reasonable of the parent to bring up the Jews because it's an interesting counterpoint to using the Romans as representatives of what people did back then.
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?
After seeing a friend do the one-meal-a-day routine, I'm pretty convinced to try it out myself. He's very healthy, active and alert. He gets sufficient calories and nutrition and he can pretty much eat whatever he wants (within reason) for his one meal. I've heard him explain several times about how he feels his brain actually functions better this way when his body isn't trying to constantly digest food all day long.
That's the same answer as "have we always breathed air?" - no. For a long time our ancestor breathed water. Going even further back, we had neither gills nor lungs and didn't breathe at all.
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.