One big meal per day --- just how bad is it for you?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve read all the relevant scholarly literature (e.g. men’s fitness magazines and Wikipedia), and they all are of one accord, that eating multiple small meals per day is invariably better than eating one huge meal per day. My question is: just how bad is it to have all one’s daily food intake at once, at least as compared to a more distributed nourishment? What ill effects should the intrepid glutton face, should he choose to stuff himself thusly?

2

If you are at all athletic, you will regret eating just one big meal a day. The food will jostle up and down in your stomach after you eat, making it difficult to do high intensity exercise.

Also, you will have poor endurance because you would not be giving your body that constant stream of complex carbohydrates necessary for long duration events.

3

I can’t answer your specific question of how “bad” one big meal per day is for you.

However, for the identical dietary calories and composition, compared to eating three times per day, a practice of near-constant “nibbling” (i.e. 17 small feedings per day) leads to about a 10 to 15 percent reduction in in cholesterol and an almost 30 percent decline in insulin. Both these changes would be expected to reduce a person’s risk of heart disease substantially. In fact, a 15 % drop in cholesterol alone, should lower a person’s risk of a heart attack by about 30%.

Here is “the” famous study on the issue.

4

I should be intellectually honest and note that there actually is some evidence to the contrary (i.e. there’s evidence that “gorging” once a day may actually be beneficial for things like cholesterol.)

This study of Muslims who eat one large meal each day during Ramadan demonstrated that HDL* levels actually rise by 23% with such a practice (with other lipid parameters not changing).

  • the ‘good’ cholesterol

I suspect that the rise in HDL that was observed in this study may well have been driven by the weight loss occurring during Ramadan, and was not due to the gorging per se.

5

I eat only one meal a day (supper.) I have no weight, blood pressure or cholesterol problems whatsoever. But everyone DOES think I’m a weirdo!