How are we supposed to eat?

Siran12001

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.

Jayj180894

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.

Jayj180894

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?

kommodevaran

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.

xxzenabxx

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.

amusedmonkey

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.

savithny

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.

savithny

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.

MegaMooseEsq

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.

Lounmoun

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.

cwolfman13

Jayj180894 wrote: »

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.

There is no "designed for" or "supposed to"...humans are highly adaptable which is why we thrive...

Jruzer

Jayj180894 wrote: »

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.

Fair questions, but look at the words here. If our bodies are "designed", then who is the designer? If we are "supposed" to do something, who or what supplies the meaning? Questions like this are philosophical or religious.

Another way of asking would be "what is the optimal human diet?" But even then you have to decide how to do the optimization.

lemurcat12

Jayj180894 wrote: »

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

Our bodies were not "designed" to eat any particular way. That includes some major assumptions.

We evolved over time (whatever you believe about why we exist at all), and did so in a wide variety of environments and changing environments. We ate when food was available and under cultural traditions that made sense given the food enviroments in which those cultures lived.

What food was available depended on where and when we were. There is no one human habitat and even if there were that habitat changed as more humans were invariably born or climate changed (which it did numerous times).

We wandered from Africa to the entire world -- clearly lots and lots of different climates and cultures and eating patterns.

avskk

I think it might be helpful to remember that human bodies weren't "designed" at all. Evolution is a series of adaptations, it is ongoing, and it is not conscious or purposeful. It doesn't matter what our ancestors ate at some arbitrary point in the past; it doesn't even really matter what food-related adaptations we might have inherited and live with today, other than specific issues (such as lactose intolerance) that can make us individually ill. We're still adapting. It's a continual process until extinction.

Eat whatever you like that doesn't make you ill, at whatever times best suit your hunger cycles, in quantities and types appropriate to your body's individual needs. Your body is not my body is not anyone else's body; none of us were "designed" and adaptations are not homogenous across entire species. I may have inherited a particular mutation -- such as the aforementioned lactose intolerance -- that you do not have. Neither of us will ever know which of our bodies carries traits useful to the survival of the species, because the process that cements such mutations as useful adaptations takes place over millennia, not a single lifetime. The best we can do is avoid things that make us sick, eat things that support our health, and try not to overeat.

Rebecca0224

avskk wrote: »

I think it might be helpful to remember that human bodies weren't "designed" at all. Evolution is a series of adaptations, it is ongoing, and it is not conscious or purposeful. It doesn't matter what our ancestors ate at some arbitrary point in the past; it doesn't even really matter what food-related adaptations we might have inherited and live with today, other than specific issues (such as lactose intolerance) that can make us individually ill. We're still adapting. It's a continual process until extinction.

Eat whatever you like that doesn't make you ill, at whatever times best suit your hunger cycles, in quantities and types appropriate to your body's individual needs. Your body is not my body is not anyone else's body; none of us were "designed" and adaptations are not homogenous across entire species. I may have inherited a particular mutation -- such as the aforementioned lactose intolerance -- that you do not have. Neither of us will ever know which of our bodies carries traits useful to the survival of the species, because the process that cements such mutations as useful adaptations takes place over millennia, not a single lifetime. The best we can do is avoid things that make us sick, eat things that support our health, and try not to overeat.

The bolded from the above post is important to think about. Evolution takes time. Humans currently have a very pampered life compared to 20 or 30 thousand years ago, things have changed dramatically in the last 50 to 100 years. Thousands of years ago our ancestors ate whenever possible and as much as possible and evolution hasn't changed that yet but we have more food available and that's a problem for some people.

As far as what the body is designed for that can be put into simple terms. The human body is designed to extract nutrition from anything consumed. For the general population meal timing and frequency are irrelevant.