If humans can go weeks without eating, why do we eat 3 times a day?
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If people were like cars, then going a while without “fueling up” would make sense.
So, let’s think if cars were more like people. Instead of the gas being used only when the car is on and driving, gas is being used all the time. After a lot of mishaps where people would get in their cars after a few days of non-use, only to find the car out of gas… eventually people would demand the car alert the owner whenever it had gone some time without gas.
Let’s make cars be even more like people: if the gas is not full, then some functions of the car degrade. You’re not able to turn on the AC or the radio when it’s down a quarter tank; at half a tank, your brakes may be weaker, increasing the risk of a crash.
Our bodies evolved the same way; it’s not going to just warn you when you’re only a few hours away from starving to death, it’s going to bug you periodically with hunger pangs and there’s going to be problems if you don’t react to them by seeking a meal.
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.
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
Fat and muscle are like your savings account. Meals are like your paychecks. Ideally you’d want your meals to come regularly, but if you miss a few your body can dip into its savings account and make do for a bit.
In your brain there’s a thingy called the hypothalamus the does a lot of neat things. In the hypothalamus there’s a part called the ventromedial nucleus that makes you feel full when you’ve had enough to eat. Another part, the lateral hypothalamus, makes you feel hungry.
If your body gets too much food, not enough food, or the wrong food, bad things can happen. It’s a big strain on the body to go for too long without eating, and it’s not healthy to eat too much too often.
Three times a day is just a convenient way to break up the day for eating, but it’s more of a cultural thing than anything else. You could hook yourself up to an intravenous nutrient drip and get a constant stream of food throughout your day, or you could get all your caloric needs met with one big meal. Or you could fast intermittently. There’s some debate over how often it’s best to eat and how long it’s best to take a break from eating, but for the most part, most people’s bodies do a pretty good job of letting them know when they need food. And if yours doesn’t, there’s apps that help you with the math
Humans really should not be eating three times a day, biologically we are built for feast and famine. In the distant past, the goal was to eat as much as possible to build up fat reserves and survive without eating for long periods. That is why being fat was seen as a great thing in history, because it showed you had wealth and access to food.
Nowadays, every person has access to unlimited food and calories dense food at that. The three meals a day is meant to provide around 2,000 calories a day (ie a split of about 675 calories a meal). It is very hard to eat 675 calories a meal in America because our potion sizes are insane (a big mac is 600 cals). So people eat a thousand calories per meal which leads to an surpluses in calories. The obesity epidemic is the biggest health and financial threat to America.
You don’t need three meals, just need to hit your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) which is roughly 2,250 cals on average.
The push to constantly eat has led to world into our current epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Don’t take my word for it – just look around.
We *don’t* need to eat three or more times a day, and for most of us in the West, it would be much healthier not to.
For much more on this, check out /r/fasting, or google: fasting jason fung
Meal times have an interesting history. I’ll give ya a boring version!
Romans would eat one meal a day, basically around noon. OMAD, basically.
Then people starting doing two meals for whatever reasons. Probably still, technically, intermittent fasting.
Then three meals came around several hundred years ago, and metabolic disorders have been increasing ever since!
People are meant to go without food occasionally. This trips a critical metabolic switch: burning fat, producing ketones, activating autophagy, and more! Called fasting metabolism for obvious reasons. Fasting has numerous clinical benefits.
You don’t need to eat 3 meals an day. I usually eat one big meal a day. With an occasional snack. No refined carbs. Mostly meat,some fruits, some vegetables. Do what’s best for you.
We don’t really need to eat 3 times a day. In fact we probably shouldn’t be, and there’s lots of research that supports this. Our hunter gatherer ancestors would have had occasional days without food, and the body is designed for this fact. There’s very conclusive research that demonstrates caloric restriction greatly increases the lifespan of lab mice (by around 40%!), and very likely in people too. There are biological process that are activated to allow the body to cope with harder times, in a similar that other stressors like exercise promote health benefits. When you think about it, the fact that we’re constantly in a fed state, 24/7, and that many of us have never really experienced true hunger, is a pretty weird thing, and probably not “natural”.
Most people run on glucose and have blood sugar spikes and dips that make it very uncomfortable to go very long without food unless they have to. They eat three meals plus snacks. Keto dieters regularly fast comfortably. I personally do intermittent fasting and eat just two meals a day.
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