Regular meals are good, snacks are bad. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, if you eat dinner with your family you can keep your teenage figure and have healthier children, and eating lunch makes work go smoother. — these words are almost the consensus, but now, please forget them all. It turns out that three meals a day actually do little for metabolic needs; the three meals we’ve been adhering to, almost as dogma, can actually make the body sick. Historian Abigail Carroll, who wrote a book called “Three Meals a Day: The Invention of the American Diet,” explains that the habit of eating three meals a day dates back to at least medieval Europe. When the European colonists arrived in the Americas, they introduced their diet: a small amount of light cold porridge or small turnips in the morning, a little heavier and more cooked food to eat at noon, and at the end of the day to eat as little as the first meal. They found that the Native Americans were not as rigid and strict as their diet, and the amount and timing of eating varied according to the seasons. They even fasted when food was scarce. European people call these behaviors “evidence of the uncivilized nature of the natives. Carroll explained to me in an email, “Civilized people eat properly and draw boundaries on what they eat to distinguish themselves from animals.” So the Europeans were interested in the eating patterns of the indigenous tribes, and in fact they used watching the people of the Americas eat as an entertaining pastime. The three meals a day habit brought by the colonists improved the American way of life. As the people became more affluent, they began to include meat foods in their breakfasts and dinners. After the Industrial Revolution, people moved away from their homelands to work in the field, lunches became more casual, and cooked meals began to be transferred for consumption for dinner when they returned home at the end of the day. The only thing that didn’t change was the total amount of food people ate, which remained the same despite the fact that they had given up a lot of the active and hyperactive lifestyle they had when they were farming and transformed into sedentary urban working people. People still ate a lot of breakfast, and it didn’t take long for doctors to report that more and more patients were suffering from indigestion. In 1897, brothers Will Keith Kellogg and John Harvey Kellogg introduced corn flakes as a nutritious breakfast, with an ulterior motive: they wanted to promote the benefits of a vegetarian diet because it was They wanted to promote the benefits of a vegetarian diet because it was part of their Seventh-day Adventist beliefs. Cornflakes quickly replaced the traditional breakfast and in the following years made breakfast a healthy food specialty. Fruit farmers also began to seize the opportunity to sell fruit juice, advertising their products as containing newly discovered “vitamins”. Breakfast producers warned the public of the dangers of skipping the “most important meal of the day”. This theory is still believed today, see Kellogg’s paper on the health benefits of breakfast (http://www.kelloggs.com/en_US/the-benefits-of-cereal.html). But there’s a problem that persists: scientific studies show that eating breakfast or skipping it makes no difference when it comes to maintaining the body’s metabolic system, the mechanism that helps us convert food into energy. We know that an imbalance in the metabolic system can lead to diabetes or other disorders. So eating or not eating breakfast has no effect on the body’s metabolism. A 2014 study by the University of Bath showed that breakfast has zero effect on the body’s metabolic function. People who eat breakfast do consume more calories than those who don’t, but their net caloric expenditure is the same because those who consume breakfast burn off the extra calories they consume at breakfast. A similar University of Alabama study also found that eating or not eating breakfast had no effect on weight loss in people who wanted to diet to lose weight. A 2010 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition noted that there was no difference in weight or hormones between a group of volunteers who ate three meals a day and a group who ate six meals a day (the same total calories in both groups.) In 2014, researchers at the University of Warwick in England found that among women who ate two meals a day and those who ate five meals a day, there was no difference in metabolic function in the new cities between the two groups. The only thing that could actually improve metabolic levels was regular fasting, which was identified by early European colonists as a sign of uncivilization. Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging, observed a series of mice over the past two decades and found that those who were not fed occasionally would be leaner, healthier and live longer than those who were fed regularly. Mattson himself skips breakfast and lunch most days, creating a theory that the lack of calories can act as a mild stressor to help our cells build defense mechanisms against damage from aging, environmental toxins and other threats. Other studies have also shown that regular fasting can prevent heart disease. Meanwhile, Satchidananda Panda, a biologist at the Sark Institute of Biological Studies, looked at a 2012 study that found that giving rats an eight-hour gap after they had digested all their calories reduced their chances of developing metabolic diseases such as diabetes, and that rats that ate as much as they wanted were much more at risk. A study last year confirmed this finding, although no one has conducted a similar study in humans. So, should you give up your regular three meals and replace them with intermittent fasting? It’s worth a try. Christopher Ochner, a weight loss and nutrition expert at Mount Nye Hospital in New York, points out that there is no set of solutions that works for everyone: some people are fine eating all the calories they need at once, while others need to divide them into small pieces and ingest them slowly. Instead of going overboard with the volume and frequency of regular meals, Ochner’s advice is simpler: don’t eat because the meal is on the table, but eat when you’re hungry. It’s an abandoned technique, he says. In industrialized societies, people don’t worry about eating; we eat to socialize or because a certain food smells delicious. We might find the best way to eat if we could learn to concentrate on our bodies rather than be influenced by our environment.