Snacking?

[cpeterson]

I have read for many years that a person should eat 4-5 small meals a day in order to speed up or maintain one's metabolism.  The Whole 30 program discourages snacking and I am worried that eating 3 meals per day is going to slow down my metabolism.

[ladyshanny]

From Whole30 friend Steph Gaudreau: 

 

Going 4 to 6 hours comfortably between meals is NORMAL. It gives our bodies time to digest what we’ve eaten and then lets our guts rest for a while. You’re not a cow, and you don’t need to graze all day. It doesn’t “rev your metabolism” or any of the other sexy claims you hear. What it does do is put constant demand on your digestive system to deal with a perpetual influx of food.

 

The article linked above is from Mark's Daily Apple which is a renowned and respected source.

 

From the article: 

 

It’s a neat-sounding theory, but it isn’t true.

First of all, there is no metabolic advantage to eating multiple meals. Yeah, your body expends metabolic energy to process and digest food, but it doesn’t matter when or how it’s eaten. You could eat a steak in a single sitting or the same steak cut up into five pieces, each eaten an hour apart, and the total energy expenditure required to process and digest the steak would be identical in both cases. So, assuming macronutrient ratios and caloric content are identical, eating more frequently doesn’t make your metabolism “burn” brighter. If it did, this study would have ruled in favor of increased meal frequency as an effective tool in weight loss for obese patients. But it didn’t.

Read more: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/meal-timing/#ixzz3wVMHY04V

[kirkor]

[praxisproject]

The "snacking" approach is very outdated, from the seventies/eighties, there has been a lot of study since then which has debunked many of these old wives tales.

 

For anyone interested in more science geekery, eating also spikes cortisol and blood sugar, so having those "rest" times between meals is important.

 

For those who are insulin resistant, snacking can also create an ongoing high "noise" level in internal signaling, which leads to further over-production of insulin, making the receptors ever more "deaf" as they are pounded all day long, never hearing "quiet" and lose their baseline status, where noisy becomes the new normal, flooding the body with excess insulin. This can lead to Type 2 diabetes.