If humans can go weeks without eating, why do we eat 3 times a day?

Question

If humans can go weeks without eating, why do we eat 3 times a day?

In: 4549

Answer 1

Humans are weird, we require a huge amount of calories compared to our body weight due to our brain size. Brains are ridiculously energy hungry, so much so that 1/5 of all calories go to your brain.

We also don’t need to eat constantly like other primates do.

How do you solve both, needing way more calories than primates of similar size, while not needing to eat nonstop?

You eat cooked foods, cooked meat, high calories, while requiring very little gut or energy to digest.

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So we normally eat 2 to 5 times a day because we need the calories for our big brains.

We only eat 3 times a day (unlike our mostly raw vegetarian primates that eat 8 hours a day), because of cooked food