Nutrition Myths?

Today I want to talk about a couple nutrition related topics that are myths?  Or are they?  When it comes to nutrition we don’t really KNOW anything for sure.  What we “knew” in 1980 has turned out to be wrong (in many cases).  What we “knew” in 1990, same thing.  What we “know” today, people may look back in the year 2030 and laugh at us.  But today, all we can do is go off the information we have at hand.  With that said - many people have “known” forever that eating food with saturated fats and cholesterol is bad for us.  And we’ve also “known” for quite some time that eating many (6-ish) meals per day will speed up our metabolism…

Myth #1: Eating 6 small meals per day will speed up our metabolism more than eating 3 meals per day

Meal Frequency – We all “know” that eating frequently speeds up our metabolism.  I’ve been told this ever since I got involved in working out.  If you look at the TEF (Thermic Effect of Food) you’ll recall that it burns calories to breakdown and use the foods that we eat.  Conventional wisdom tells us that if we eat often (5-7 meals per day), we can get this fat burning TEF more often throughout the day.  BUT, research is now showing us that although we get this effect more often, the effect is less pronounced with each smaller meal that we eat.  So basically it looks like this:

Thermic effect of 6 smaller meals – smaller thermic effect per meal

Thermic effect of 3 larger meals – larger thermic effect per meal

Essentially, at the end of the day, the thermic effect is going to be the same whether we eat 3 meals or 6 meals (assuming total calories are the same).  WOW!  All these years we’ve ALL been wrong about meal frequency and its role on metabolism (if you were saying this years ago, you were wise beyond your years.  Or simply lying about it now).  I do still think there are advantages to eating a little more frequently (like the fact that frequent eating helps many avoid getting to that panic starving state that has you pulling into the 1^stCrispy Crème that you come across), but apparently helping speed up metabolism isn’t one of them.

I first heard this “myth” talked about by Alan Aragon.  But who knows, in the future we may do more studies telling us that our original thoughts on meal frequency were right on (as in, it DOES speed up metabolism).  But for now, it does appear to be a myth.  I want to reiterate, I DO think that many people get better results with eating more often for a few different reasons.  Just know that speeding up your metabolism is NOT one of those reasons.

Myth #2: We should avoid foods containing cholesterol and saturated fats

Many people think this for a couple reasons. 1) poorly conducted and misinterpreted studies have been done on saturated fat and cholesterol.  The misinformation from these studies get passed on from generation to generation and become “fact.”  Check out Stephan Guyenet’s website for all the saturated fat/cholesterol information your heart desires. 2) The media (although I have recently seen some of the media come around on this – there is some hope from the media!  ) is still saying that saturated fat and cholesterol are the devil.  And the media reaches the largest number of people, making the average non-researching Joe more and more misinformed.

There have been many smart people that have already wrote articles on the saturated fat/cholesterol is bad for us myth.  So I am not going to reinvent the wheel here.  I really like this article talking about the benefits of eating the whole egg as opposed to just the egg whites.  You’ll see that the topic of cholesterol is addressed.  Here is a good quote from the article… 

“First of all, when you eat a food that contains a high amount of dietary cholesterol such as eggs, your body down-regulates it’s internal production of cholesterol to balance things out. On the other hand, if you don’t eat enough cholesterol, your body simply produces more since cholesterol has dozens of important vital functions in the body.”

The bottom line, don’t fear food if it has a little cholesterol in it.  And when it comes to saturated fat, what is the quote? “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” I believe. In other words, foods like eggs that come from free range chickens, grass fed beef, organic extra virgin cocunut oil, and pasture butter to name of few, have a good amount of saturated fat in them and are healthy choices.

Some foods have saturated fat in them AND a ton of sugar, AND a ton of processed carbs, AND trans-fats.  But for some reason, all too often saturated fat gets much of the blame.  If they started to put crack in all of the water we drank, that would be like me blaming the health problem on the water, rather than the crack.  Again, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.   Incorporating the foods I mentioned above SHOULD be a part of your nutrition plan.

Myths or not?  I’m not sure.   But for now, I believe the way the average person looks at cholesterol and saturated fat should be revisited.  And don’t freak out if you only get 4 meals in today, your metabolism will be just fine.