It's Time to Kill the Meal Frequency Debate and Just Eat When We're Hungry

It used to be the consensus that every day should start with a tall glass of milk, or that bread should be the base of our food pyramid. But over the years, despite the decades-strong inertia of these traditions, we've figured out that not everything our mother told us was necessarily the gospel of health.

Similarly, the common schedule of breakfast, lunch, and dinner has just kind of been a given for as far back as we can remember in Western society. Even more decisive are the ideas about what should be eaten at each of these meals. Egg dishes and cereal are scarcely seen outside of breakfast, while spaghetti and soup are seemingly verboten before noon. But more and more experts think that this militant three-meal regimen might not be doing us any favors.

Actually, there was a definitive time in the history of our species—not so terribly long ago—when we had other ideas about how to manage our food intake.

Since the Paleo and slow-food movements have renewed our interest in eating like our ancestors, maybe it helps to start there. Most ancient Egyptians ate just two meals per day: a breakfast or morning meal of bread and beer, and an evening meal that included meat, vegetables, and more bread. (The upper castes typically ate more frequently, and included wine and dairy on their menus.) The Romans also had a schedule that leaned heavily towards two meals, with a small-ish breakfast around dawn and their primary meal, cena, starting in the mid-afternoon and continuing into the evening. Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, often ate four meals a day, even having a special word for their Taco Bell-style "Fourthmeal": deilinon.

It wasn't until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, when many different industries and types of labor began to adhere to more similar and rigid schedules, that three meals per day became the indisputable norm. The only problem is that we can't seem to secure any concrete evidence that it's a nutritionally superior habit than any other number of meals.

For years, there was enthusiastic chatter about five or six smaller daily meals being the tried-and-true meal regimen for achieving weight loss. But a study from last year found that the five-meal plan doesn't really burn fat or regulate metabolism in any measurable way, although it might help to prevent you from overeating by reducing the likelihood of gorging after a long break between meals. Blood sugar begins to drop after three hours without food, and your last meal has basically been fully digested after four. Make it to five hours between meals, and you're more likely to scarf down whatever's put in front of you instead of eating mindfully and with restraint.

That's not to say that eating fewer than three meals is bad for you, either. A 2007 study from the National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program saw benefits to eating just one big early-evening meal per day and "fasting" the rest of the time around the clock actually had its own benefits. Meal skipping, although historically frowned upon by grandmas everywhere, can improve glucose regulation (though only when it corresponds with eating fewer overall calories). Light fasting has also been shown to fight chronic disease and increase overall lifespan. But that isn't to say that you won't feel grumpy when it comes to 4:30 PM and your belly is rumbling.

But overall, putting hangriness aside, there isn't much science to rally behind three meals per day any more than there is for one or five. In a 2004 report published in the Scandinavian Journal of Nutrition, eating behavior expert France Bellisle wrote, "No difference in total daily energy expenditure has been documented as a function of daily meal number."

There's even been the recent argument over on Mother Jones that the three-meal tradition is "anti-science" or "racist," due to its implementation by European settlers of North America in favor of the more intuitive mode of eating exercised by native people who inhabited the land prior. But given the ongoing and seemingly fruitless controversy surrounding the truly ideal frequency of daily eats, there is likely even further science to refute that it's "anti-science" at all.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are byproducts of the work schedule that we've chosen as our collective clock; not the other way around. The best bet for doing your body good is simply to eat when your belly tells you to, and cut back on calories in all of your meals if you're trying to lose weight.

But our three standard meals, disputed as their necessity may be, are still less controversial than brunch.