More meals are better than fewer

Smart people like to debate the question of how many daily meals or snacks is best. In our plan, we advocate five or six a day-three traditional meals and two or three snacks, or mini-meals. (You'll get to six on the days you work out, since you'll have a postworkout shake; other days have five.) Our goals: • You want to ensure you have enough food in your system, and that you get it frequently enough. It's important to avoid the hunger pangs that screw up even the best diet plans. • Frequent eating reminds you that you're on a quest to improve your health and physique. This is subjective (a hunch, in other words) , but I suspect that it's easier to stay with the program if you have to act on it five or six times a day versus three or four. The more times a day you remind yourself to eat the foods that will help you succeed, the less chance there is that you'll slip up. • There is a mild metabolic benefit to eating frequently and regularly. The last bullet point comes from a small English study published in 2004. The women in the study were tested after eating a steady pattern of six meals a day versus varying patterns of three to nine daily meals. What the researchers found is that the women had a lower thermic effect of feeding-TEF-when they varied their meal pattern day after day. Or, to put it another way, they burned more calories after meals when they followed a steady pattern of six meals a day. An artificial setup? Sure. I 've never met anyone who jumped from three to nine meals a day and back again. But it does show that there 's a real physiological effect of choosing one consistent pattern. That leads to a logical question: Does the number of meals matter, as long as there's a consistent pattern? In other words, would three meals a day work as well as four, five, or six? An article by a group of French researchers, published in the Swiss Forum of Nutrition series, sheds a bit of light on that question. In France, most children and many adults eat a fourth daily meal in between lunch and dinner. When researchers looked at adults who were accustomed to eating that fourth meal, but then stopped, they found that the meal-skippers were heavier than a comparable group who kept eating the fourth meal. But here's the kicker: Both groups ate the same number of calories. The group who spread those calories over four meals weighed less than those who squeezed them into three. A lot of nutritionists today will still tell you that the only determinant of your weight is calories in and calories out-how much you eat and how much you burn off. But here you have people who ate the same amount of food, but ate it differently, and gained weight. If nothing else, these two studies make a strong argument for establishing a pattern and sticking with it. Let's get back to TEF, the subject of the first study. Back in 1998, an Italian study showed that the higher the TEF of a meal, the more satiety you enjoy afterward-you feel full longer between meals. It's sort of a "duh! " conclusion, given that we know protein creates a much higher TEF than fat or carbohydrate, and that protein also leads to greater satiety. So it's easy enough to say, "Eat more protein at every meal. " But if TEF itself-the calories you're burning after a mealcontributes to satiety, and that effect might be independent of the type of food you're eating, then we have another solid reason to stick with a consistent meal pattern. And we also have a reason to eat something immediately after a workout. As I showed in Chapter 4, the TEF is much higher for food eaten in that window of opportunity. Put it all together, and I think there's a solid case for a consistent pattern of eating at least four times a day. Moreover, I can't see any reason to stop with four. If you go up to five, you can have a snack (or mini-meal, or whatever you prefer to call it) between breakfast and lunch, along with the one between lunch and dinner. Then, on the days you lift weights, you'll eat six times , including the protein shake you have as soon as possible after your workout. If you do that consistently-and believe me, it's easier than it sounds-you should get every possible metabolic benefit from your meal plan. FAT OUT OF HELL I have bad days, when I think everything I 've advocated about fitness and nutrition has led to the opposite behavior. One of the darkest of those dark days came when I saw a "Low Fat! " banner on a package of candy. I'm not disputing the accuracy-of course a product that's mostly sugar won't have much fat-but I resent the implication that candy is good for you by virtue of the fact it's not butter. In fact, I'd probably argue that in some circumstances butter is better for you than candy, calorie for calorie. At least your body can use some of the fats in butter to produce hormones and shore up your body's structures at the cellular level. Sugar is a one-trick pony. It provides energy, and that's it. As I said in Chapter 5, you can use just about anything digestible for energy, including butter. Heck, maybe we'll see the day when the National Dairy Council will promote butter as "sugar-free. " Before I get into the specific types of fat, and the advantages and disadvantages of each, let's cast a wider net and ask the most obvious question: Is there any inherent danger in eating fat of any type, in any quantity? The Nurses ' Health Study, an ongoing look at the health of some 80,000 women being tracked by Harvard Medical School researchers, tried to answer the big "fat" question by looking at the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. If the question is, "Is it better to eat more fat, or less?" the answer is, "You're asking the wrong question. " There isn't an overall trend, once you adjust for everything-family history, lifestyle, body weight, consumption of other types of foods, and so on. (It's also worth noting that few women in the study actually follow a lowfat diet.) The researchers drew two main conclusions: • To no one's surprise, the study showed that those eating the most trans fats had the most heart disease. You already knew that trans fats-those that start as one type of fat but are altered to make them more stable for cooking, using a process called hydrogenation-are to be avoided. • Women eating the most polyunsaturated fats had a one-third reduction in heart -disease risk, compared to women who ate the least. Which sounds great ... except it doesn't mean a thing until you understand the distinctions between different types of unsaturated fats. There's no simple way to tell. Labels tell us how much total fat, saturated fat, and trans fat you'll find in any given food (assuming it's a food that comes in a package, which rules out fresh meat, fish, and produce) . But they don't say how much unsaturated fat a food contains, or what type. So here 's a quick primer on the different types, where you're most likely to find them, and what each does for your body: Monounsaturated fat These are the fats that are most prevalent in olive oil, avocados, and nuts. About half the fats in peanuts, chicken, and various meats are monounsaturated. These fats are "nonessential," which means your body can make them from other fats you eat. They're also considered beneficial, meaning they don't present any negative consequences (they don't change your cholesterol levels, for example) , and they're easy to use for energy and to make hormones. About nuts, which are great sources of monounsaturated fats: I mentioned the Nurses ' Health Study a few paragraphs ago. (And I'll mention it again a few paragraphs ahead.) Another paper that came out of that ongoing project looked at low-carb diets. The object was to see whether, as doctors and nutritionists have long warned, such diets would lead to more heart disease. The short answer is no, but buried in the data was something really interesting: The group with the lowest heart-disease risk-about 30 percent below baseline-were those who ate the most nuts. They averaged 2.8 servings of nuts per week, which was a lot more than any other group in the study ate. Since a serving is about a quarter cup, you should get some cardiac protection with just three-quarters of a cup of nuts a week.