How are we supposed to eat?
Jayj180894
Posts: 286 Member
How are humans in general suppose to eat? Are we grazers? Are we supposed to eat one big meal a day? I've heard 3 meals a day is just a traditional way of eating, that we are "stuck in". I have also heard that grazing or 5-7 small meals a day slows your metabolism down making it harder to lose weight. Also I have heard that fasting is no good for our brain, can increase fatigue, irritability and make us crave bad foods. So how are our bodies supposed to intake food, what are they designed for, how did our ancestors eat.
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'Our ancestors' would depend a lot from where your roots come from. Even so, I wouldn't worry so much about what my ancestors ate as to what suits me now. If you feel like what you're doing now isn't working, then mix it up a bit. Try several small meals throughout the day (they don't slow your metabolism down), or three meals, or one large meal. Just ensure that it's something you'll be able to stick to long-term.10
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Humans are adaptable, that's why we're so successful. Well, that and the huge brain.
Eat what you like, when you like, stay within calories, die anyway.30 -
I did wonder that as we would of adapted from our habitat. I really just wondered what our bodies are designed for. I did believe that the small meals a day did slow the metabolism down and I'm glad you have put me straight! I just eat as and when I'm hungry to be honest just save enough calories for the evening for a biggish meal so i feel satisfied. Seems to be working
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cmriverside wrote: »Humans are adaptable, that's why we're so successful. Well, that and the huge brain.
Eat what you like, when you like, stay within calories, die anyway.
Very much like rats
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Humans should eat the amount of food required to maintain our energy balance, and enough variety to satisfy our nutritional needs. Since we are highly adaptable creatures with individual likes and dislikes, what we eat and when we eat is a choice, so we should eat the foods that satisfy us at the times that work for our bodies. Humans are designed to survive in a wide variety of environments; as long as energy balance and nutritional needs are met, the choice is yours.4
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I ask, "Heard from whom?" Humans are, you may use the word "evolved" and you may use the word "adapted", and they have somewhat different meanings, but we can survive if our need for water is met only every other day while our need for calories is met just once a week or even less. Our bodies will scavenge energy from self-contained stores of fat, scavenge amino acids from breaking down self-contained stores of protein, scavenge minerals from breaking down our own bones, and generally find every last bodily resource to redeploy in supply and service to the brain before finally yielding to death. Anything we eat that keeps us from death is a perfectly good way of experiencing life.11
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How far back do you want to go in human history? When we were hunter-gatherers? Early agriculturalists? Even since the beginning of industrialization and mass production of foods, our diets have changed in the last 50 years. Before globalization, diets were primarily based on local food availability. People in modern day China may not have eaten the same as an Yanomami in the Amazon.
If you have a standing interest in human evolution, you should check out "The Story of the Human Body".8 -
JeromeBarry1 wrote: »I ask, "Heard from whom?" Humans are, you may use the word "evolved" and you may use the word "adapted", and they have somewhat different meanings, but we can survive if our need for water is met only every other day while our need for calories is met just once a week or even less. Our bodies will scavenge energy from self-contained stores of fat, scavenge amino acids from breaking down self-contained stores of protein, scavenge minerals from breaking down our own bones, and generally find every last bodily resource to redeploy in supply and service to the brain before finally yielding to death. Anything we eat that keeps us from death is a perfectly good way of experiencing life.
I watched a programme on weight loss and a celebrity doctor who is highly thought of in the UK was explaining that eating 3 meals a day was a "Victorian" way of eating, to which we need to snap out of. The rest is what I have picked up online from different sources. I do realise that A LOT is very conflicting. So I'm getting a general feel that our bodies aren't designed in any one way for feeding? Just as long as we are meeting our RDA.2 -
Three meals a day is a modern way of eating. At one point it was 5 meals a day if you include elevenses and high tea. It's more of a social construct than anything. My partner is a big muscular guy and works an intense physically demanding job. He has eaten one big meal a day late at night for the last 20 plus years. It works for him.
I'm no-diabetic hypoglycemic and that would never work for me.
Do what ever suits you at the time. Mix it up if you want it doesnt really matter.0 -
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We are supposed to eat how we do.0
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Most of our ancestors died before 30, so I don't think following what our ancestors did is the way to go.11
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But at least you won't die getting squashed by a T-Rex.cmriverside wrote: »Humans are adaptable, that's why we're so successful. Well, that and the huge brain.
Eat what you like, when you like, stay within calories, die anyway.
Try and bunch of things and find what works for you. Personally, I like to spread my calories over 5 meals, pretty much equally. But it took 2 years of trial and error to figure that out.
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Jayj180894 wrote: »How are humans in general suppose to eat?
In general, with your mouth closed...but not all do.
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I would like to recommend to OP and to anyone weighing in or simply reading this thread, a book titled "Sapiens" by professor Yuval Noah Harari. You might enjoy it...
No preach, no angle...just a good book about how we got here.4 -
Our ancestors got by on a steady diet of whatever they could fit in their face holes that didn't poison them to death. Humans are a highly adaptable species - and a highly varied one.
That may be disappointing if you're looking for guidance about what your body is "optimized" to eat, but, well, unless you're asking a dietitian who knows your history (or someone who wants to sell you a book or magazine), that's really all you're going to get.
The best thing you can do toward figuring out what you're best off eating to eat is to use MFP or another food journaling platform religiously, and note how you feel. See if you can spot correlation between eating a certain food and feeling really, really good the next day, or eating at a certain time and getting sick, or something like that.
The only thing you mentioned up there that's completely true is that 3 meals a day is a social construct - and that doesn't mean it's unnatural or unhealthy; it's just a culture-bound convenient pattern based around the modern work day. Which is not far from how our ancestors did it - they adopted a pattern based around when someone brought home a fresh deer carcass or found a nice ripe harvest of berries.2 -
MichelleSilverleaf wrote: »'Our ancestors' would depend a lot from where your roots come from. Even so, I wouldn't worry so much about what my ancestors ate as to what suits me now. If you feel like what you're doing now isn't working, then mix it up a bit. Try several small meals throughout the day (they don't slow your metabolism down), or three meals, or one large meal. Just ensure that it's something you'll be able to stick to long-term.
"Our ancestors" would also depend on how many centuries or millenia you look back. It's a pretty arbitrary way of deciding how to eat. As MichelleSilverleaf says, find what works for you now.0 -
But at least you won't die getting squashed by a T-Rex.
Actually, homo sapiens have only been around for about 1-2 million years. T-Rex and other dinos lived about 85-65 million years ago after which they became extinct.
So, humans and dinos never lived at the same time. Only the extinction of dinos and the emergence of mammals as a viable species made it possible for apes and humans to evolve.
As for what we are optimized to eat, we are omnivores and (food politics aside) can/will eat anything. Just ask Andrew Zimmern on Bizzare Foods.
Before organized agriculture, animal husbandr and food storage technology, we ate whatever we could kill or fin, whenever we could kill or find anything to eat. And, when we couldn't kill or find anything to eat, we starved.
It's called feast or famine and it's the same for ALL animals in the wild. That's why our bodies store excess food as fat and burns fat when there is no food to eat. However, this isn't very instructive in terms of deciding how we are "supposed" to eat or choosing the "best" way to eat.
For me, the best way to eat is when I am hungry and only enough to maintain my weight at my desired weight and BF level. I do that by eating/snacking 2-5x's a day, logging everything that I eat and limiting my intake to the caloric limit that will achieve my weight/BF objectives.
What works for others will probably vary.
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It doesn't really matter when you eat and how often you eat. It really depends on the person, if a certain rhythm works for them. I've never liked breakfast because I'm not really hungry at the time. I've tried a few times to eat breakfast because it was supposed to be healthy. Now I've given up on breakfast and eat most of my calories in two big meals with some snacks in between. Other people I know eat a lot smaller meals but seem to eat all the time. There is really no right or wrong, just what works for you and what doesn't. Don't force yourself to eat at a certain rhythm, if your body doesn't want it.1
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Sorry guys, I wasn't looking for advice. Probably the wrong forum or even app to post on. I was just interested in what our bodies was designed for and if their was in a tual eating pattern we are "supposed"to eat. Thanks for the advice on some interesting reads though! I personally just eat whenever I'm hungry. Sometimes breakfast, sometimes not! As long as I have a good munch in the evening I don't care personally. And I don't go over my calories!! Works for me! . It just got me thinking as most grazing animals horses, cows, sheep would get very poorly if they ate how a lion would. 2
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zachbonner_ wrote: »supposed to eat whenever you caught your prey
That could of been weekly though. Did we graze throughout the day on berries, insects or grain? We tend to eat when we are hungry and until we aren't hungry anymore, so would we have gone out to hunt that often if we wasn't that hungry?0 -
I think it's useful to separate what we evolved in (environment) from what we evolved to (behavior). Just making this distinction, makes it obvious why you ask, and why so many of us are fat - we are hunter/gatherers (with an instictive liking for calorie dense foods, an evolutionary necessity) trapped in a sweet shop. Eating when hungry and stopping when we aren't hungry anymore would sound absurd to a person born more than 100 years ago - opportunities for eating were rare, and opportunities for stuffing oneself very rare - when there was food, you ate, period.
Hunting is not the same as shopping. Hunting in the stone age was both extremely labor-intensive and extremely dangerous. You didn't hunt just because you felt peckish and craving a snack. It was a matter of life or death - for both parties. Making food edible was also a lot of work, and you couldn't just pop leftovers in the fridge - you ate, or you let it go.
The sensation of "life or death" is hardwired in us, from necessity, and ironically, it tends to really bother us now, because it's out of context and proportion - we get cravings that feel extremely urgent, for something we rationally know isn't urgent at all. Evolutionary, it makes sense to react to food cues - to have an appetite - feel the drive to get food when you see it. Now we see food all the time, and many of us want to eat all the time, as a result, and many do.
Meal times is a social construct - as mentioned - a more reliable food supply and civilisation made some kind of predefined structure necessary and possible.
Now we have a situation where we have so much food, so easy to eat, so tasty, all around us, all the time, and no cultural norms to tell us when it's inappropriate to eat, or when it's appropriate to stop eating; in fact, we are encouraged to eat as much as possible, as often as possible.6 -
Well from what I've read it was a situation of feast and fast. So sometimes food was not available for days so we had to fast and then we would feast on a huge meal once we went hunting.0
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We are not "supposed" to eat in any particular way. Some early humans lived in locations where they were able to graze all day on plants and bugs with no distinct meals while moving around nomadically, others lived where they only had large meals when they could and no food when they couldn't. Some lived primarily on seafood, others lived primarily on plant foods, yet others on animal sources. Some ate grains, others didn't. Some subsisted on certain foods only in certain seasons.
Basically, we are opportunistic omnivores that are able to survive in all kinds of environments, and I pretty much guarantee that if twinkies grew on trees our ancestors would have eaten them in a heartbeat.
If you want to eat what is naturally a human diet, you will need to basically eat whatever is available whenever it is available in whatever quantity available, basically like most people do now and one of the reasons many are obese (since quantity and caloric quality of food has increased by a lot since prehistoric times).
ETA: for weight management you need to go a little bit against human nature since we have not evolved in such an abundance and basically control your calories in some way or form.5 -
Human beings colonized every single continent except Antarctica before we developed agriculture. We moved into every available ecological niche and learned to exploit it in a way that kept us from dying out in that niche. We've lived above the arctic circle, in deserts, in rainforests, on mountaintops.
We did that by being able to assess our environment and develop responses to it that allowed us to find the food we needed. We did that by being opportunistic omnivores who eat just about anything.
There is no one way to eat or set of things to eat. There is no "one perfect human diet." There's no set of superfoods that we can assemble that will make us Supermen, and there's no perfect timing to do any of it.7 -
Furthermore, if you are trying to find a biological justification for eating a certain way, you have to remember that eating to lose weight is not what ANY of these systems are set up to do. They're all finely tuned for a world where supercaloric foods are rare and seasonal. To our ancestors, having 5% body fat was a bad thing, not a good thing.7
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Jayj180894 wrote: »zachbonner_ wrote: »supposed to eat whenever you caught your prey
That could of been weekly though. Did we graze throughout the day on berries, insects or grain? We tend to eat when we are hungry and until we aren't hungry anymore, so would we have gone out to hunt that often if we wasn't that hungry?
I think that's the "gather" part of the "hunter/gatherer" split. I believe that animals that rely almost exclusively on hunting for food generally do not need to eat at often as, say, grazing animals (who can still survive in a fasting state for some time) or omnivores like humans (who can also go several days fasting). I saw a documentary on polar bears that said that they generally eat maybe 2-5 times a month, and that females can store up enough energy to go *months* without eating while pregnant.0 -
Jayj180894 wrote: »How are humans in general suppose to eat? Are we grazers? Are we supposed to eat one big meal a day? I've heard 3 meals a day is just a traditional way of eating, that we are "stuck in". I have also heard that grazing or 5-7 small meals a day slows your metabolism down making it harder to lose weight. Also I have heard that fasting is no good for our brain, can increase fatigue, irritability and make us crave bad foods. So how are our bodies supposed to intake food, what are they designed for, how did our ancestors eat.
How often and what you eat are largely personal preference, local culture, local environment, and economics.
Generally all humans need things like protein, vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates to keep our bodies functioning well. You can get these nutrients from different sources. Amounts needed differ. You can survive not getting an ideal diet which many of our ancestors probably did.
I don't know why people like to talk about hunter gatherers diet as ideal so much. They ate what they could find in their local area that didn't kill them. Obviously humanity has survived and multiplied very well eating a variety of foods post agriculture and industrial revolution. If a species is designed to live to adulthood, have offspring, raise offspring before dying then population numbers suggest humans are designed to eat whatever they can.
Weight management is about calories not meal timing or type of food or how the first humans ate though.1
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