Mindconnection Brainpower Informational eNewsletter 2025-06-08

How many meals per day should you have? Many people believe the correct answer is three. But it's not. Just because prisons and the military do this does not mean it's smart.

For as long as I can remember, I have had five or six meals per day. As a kid there was always that big snack after school (but before supper); it might be two slices of a pie my mom baked, a peanut butter and banana sandwich, half a 32 oz container of yogurt and an apple. a bowl of bean salad, or whatever. But it contained enough calories and protein to be more than just a tiny snack. Ditto, that after supper / before bed item. Quite often, it was leftover home-made pizza or just a random container of leftovers. Many of us grew up eating this way but not thinking of those small meals as meals. And as adults, many of us dropped them for whatever reason and settled into the three meal schedule.

Odd or common?

Federal labor laws require three breaks per shift. These consist of a 15 minute mid-morning break, a 30 minute lunch break, and a 15 minute afternoon break. Every factory (including small job shops) has a break room. These typically have refrigerators, microwave ovens, and vending machines with sandwiches, fruit, nuts, and various other edibles. Take a wild guess at what most employees do while sitting in that room for 15 minutes? Yep, they munch on something. And typically, it's a "mini-meal" like a sandwich, bag of nuts, or something "quick" they brought from home or snagged at the convenience store on the way in. In some larger factories, there's a regular cafeteria with a kitchen producing the offerings. It's open with hot food for all scheduled breaks.

So a typical factory worker eats three meals while at work. If that same typical factory worker eats breakfast before work, eats supper after work, and has a piece of pie or other substantial snack before bed, that is six meals per day. Yes, two of those meals are significantly larger than the other four. But you are still seeing calories and protein spread across the day instead of concentrated into only two or three time slots. This same dynamic occurs, by law, in construction work.

And many white collar people do something similar despite not having formally scheduled breaks (the breaks are still mandated by law, but there's no break whistle as there is on a production line). There's not only wisdom in refueling mid-day, there is a long-standing practice that is based on experience and that is encoded into our labor laws. This means tens of millions of people in just the USA alone eat twice as often as those limiting themselves to three meals a day. We are not the only country in which people do this, either.

Why?

Other than possibly avoiding hunger, is there some reason so many people eat five or six meals a day? Think about energy, you'll have one good answer. The mid-morning and mid-afternoon energy crashes are solved by simply eating a small meal at that time. Avoiding the midnight munchies is another reason to have a small meal late in the day.

Health benefits

The single biggest health benefit is that you spread your protein intake across the day. Your body cannot store protein. If you eat more at one time than your body can use, the excess gets broken down into various substances including sugar and uric acid. The sugar is then converted to fat, and this happens because the pancreas releases insulin in response to the sugar. Because insulin depresses testosterone, a big 40g whey protein shake after a workout is a bad idea. In fact, any excess protein is a bad idea because your bones store calcium based on the testosterone signal to do so. It's also a bad idea because your kidneys are then tasked with handling all that uric acid. This is hard on the kidneys, and kidney disease is a major cause of death in the USA.

Whey is a "fast absorbing" form of protein, due to the relatively small molecule. Casein is a larger molecule and hits the bloodstream slowly. How much protein you can safely eat at one time is hard to calculate, because there are so many variables. But a general rule of thumb for a male of average size is 20 grams of whey at one time. We can assume a higher number for the other, slower proteins.

Now, let's say you desire 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. Body builders typically seek 1.8 to 2 grams per pound of body weight, so this 1 gram is reasonable. Let's say your protein mix allows you to consume 25 grams per pound of body weight and you weigh 150 lbs. With three meals per day for consuming 150 grams, you'd be at 50 grams per meal. That's twice the estimated limit. With six meals, you'd be spot on. Now, let's add one of those variables.

You will slow the protein absorption simply by eating other things with the protein. For example, instead of a 20g protein shake you eat a three egg omelet (21 grams of protein) along with some spinach and an apple. It's going to take your body longer to digest that meal than it would take your body to intake a liquid slurry of milk or vegetable protein extract. Is the effect significant? To answer that, we can sit down with an endocrinologist and ask why they say it's OK to eat an apple but horrible to drink apple juice. The apple juice will hit the bloodstream rapidly, just as refined cane sugar does, resulting in an endocrine modification event that is decidedly unhealthy. But eating the same number of calories via the whole fruit produces no sugar spike. And remember, excess protein is converted to sugar because the body cannot store protein.

And this is just for the protein aspect. There are other negative consequences that spreading your meals out will ameliorate or even eliminate. These include nutrient malabsorption, intestinal tract overload and bloating, mental fog, energy spikes and dips, and insulin swings.

What is a meal?

I've hinted at this already, and have used examples also. That does not include "grazing" which is nearly always a method of consuming highly processed non-food instead of eating an actual meal. Don't think of a meal as something you eat until your stomach is full. Think of it as something that gives you both pleasure and sustenance several times per day.

A meal doesn't need to be filling, but it does need to be fueling. It needs to taste good, so that you look forward to it. When I worked on a paper mill construction job, my boss loved his boiled peanuts every afternoon. At a nuclear power plant, all the guys in my engineering trailer took an "orange break" in the afternoon because our coworker Tim always had two oranges in the afternoon.

Common "at work" small meals include:

Two hard boiled eggs. Eaten with a pepper shaker handy.
Peanut butter and sliced apple sandwich.
Can of tuna, followed by a banana.
Bag of celery sticks filled with peanut butter.

Common "at home" small meals include:

Omelet and fruit.
Scrambled eggs and fruit.
Raw eggs mixed with natural peanut butter and blendered (I had this daily in my senior year of high school).
Popcorn and handful of nuts.
Yogurt (plain, non-homogenized).

Small meals for "on the road" include:

Stuffed pocket pitas kept in a cooler.
Protein bar and a piece of fruit.
Sealable bag of mixed nuts, tiny amount of raisins or other dried fruit added.
Baked sweet potato kept in a cooler.

Of course, we are not talking about adding small meals to an existing three meal schedule. We are talking about eating the same total amount of food, just across more sessions. You have to make those two big meals smaller and put what you take away from them (in terms of meal volume) into other, smaller meals.

Schedule

I keep my meal schedule very simple. I assume noon as the time for meal #3, as that is traditionally lunch time. Go back three hours for meal #2 and forward three hours for meal #4. Go back three hours again for meal #1 and meal #5, respectively. Meal #6 is, in my case, the smallest. It barely qualifies as a "snack plus". This schedule of mine echoes the labor law based schedule mentioned earlier. The point of it is to get the most spread of meal times during the day.

Downsides

No pun intended, but there's no free lunch. The two main downsides:

Twice as many meals to make. The solution is batch prepping. This obviously doesn't work with making omelets, but it works with many other things. People who go from three to six meals but also change to batch prepping see their total food preparation time is slightly less per day.
More bathroom trips. You'll have more frequent stools, albeit smaller ones. This alone has significant health benefits. If you have been constipated or straining while on a three meal schedule, going to six will likely fix that.

Also, interacting with those on a three meal schedule will require some finesse. You eat less per meal and you eat more often. My strategy has been not to apologize for this, but just to do it and not make a big deal about it. You may find a different strategy works for you. I will say that getting into an argument about it is pointless, but having a discussion with someone who is genuinely curious about it can help that other person understand why you choose this approach. Not everyone who sees the science behind six meals per day will change their customs, and you should not expect them to. But at the same time, they should not expect you do change your meal frequency just to suit them and what they are used to.

Going from three to six meals per day is not as profound health-wise as, say, quitting smoking. But it is a practice well worth doing. If you're already doing this, then you already know that. You might not have known some of the details I provided here.

Mindconnection eNL, 2025-06-08

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