Eating every three hours is seen by many as the best way to keep the brain ticking and the legs pumping. But is eating little and often really the key to good health?
Health advice often swings between pro- and anti-snacking, and currently snacking is the trend. For example, advertisements for cereal bars suggest they boost performance and that hungry means unhealthy, but it’s a myth that we will “crash” if we don’t eat every three or four hours.
Some recent research suggests that continual grazing through the day is linked to an overly active immune system, although whether this is harmful to health isn’t yet clear.Snacking in itself neither helps weight loss nor causes weight gain. Allowing ourselves to get very hungry, however, when there are lots of high-calorie treats on hand is a temptation to our survival-seeking primal instincts. The signals that are released by the most ancient, animal-like parts of our brain in the hypothalamus when we are very hungry subvert our rational thinking so that we grab whatever is going to provide maximum fuel—such as the bag of chips and chocolate bar lurking in the desk drawer.
This graph shows that grazers feel hungry more often, because their bodies expect food at the times they usually snack. By contrast, nongrazers usually don’t feel hungry until lunchtime.
This post might be more relevant and engaging in the ~food_and_drinks or ~charts_and_numbers territory.