Smartphone App Shows 3 Meals A Day Is A Myth

Our parents taught us to eat three square meals a day. Yet a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism shows that this may not be the healthiest thing to do.

"Our research on the benefits of time-restricted feeding in mice elicited mixed feedback," Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Salk Institute's Regulatory Biology Laboratory and graduate student Shubhroz Gill said in a statement. "While several people thought humans do eat randomly and the approach might have translational significance, others said that we largely eat three meals every day within a 10- to 12-hour interval."

Researchers were able to track the eating habits of 156 volunteers were the help of the smartphone app, myCircaidianclock, developed by Panda and designed to capture pictures of everything the participants ate and drank. The pictures were then immediately uploaded and sent to central server to determine what and when the participants were eating something in real time.

Researchers found that participants typically consumed less than 25 percent of their daily averages before noon and close to 37 percent of their caloric intake after 6 p.m. Another 12 percent of calories were consumed after 9 p.m. Furthermore, instead of having set times for any meal, many involved average eating around three to 10 "eating events" that ranged from a snack to a full meal.

The findings showed that many were eating too much, some even throughout the entire day. In fact, the average snack time between breakfast and a person's last meal of the day was about 14 hours and 45 minutes. The researchers suggest this knowledge could help people lose weight by limiting their food intake to 12 hours a day.

"Lifestyle is a combination of what we do and when we do it," Panda explained. "And when it comes to food, there has been a lot of research done to monitor what people eat, and there are also suggestions of what they should not eat. But when it comes to timing, we haven't figure out this aspect of lifestyle."

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