Actually there is a very big reason for why your advice is harmful, for me at least, but I suspect that for others as well. At 5pm I'm still at work, which means that whatever meal I'll have will be fast food and not a home cooked meal.
But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family, as in that moment during the day that can be shared without feeling rushed and if you want to sit together with your wife and kids, anything less than 8pm is not doable, as afternoons are usually unpredictable, as for example that's also the time of day when people go shopping or solve other chores.
The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and I'm willing to bet that this trait of modern life is much more harmful than fats, carbohydrates or whatever identified nutritional element is the enemy du-jour.
You can also take a "home cooked meal" with you to work - for lunch purposes.
> But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family
It is an opportunity - why do you think it is the _perfect_ opportunity?
> The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and ...
There are many ways to share time together - it's not necessary to eat while doing so.
Everyone is different. If someone is really thin they probably should eat a massive third meal because the body does need stored body fat too.
Why not both?
What is interesting is the mechanism that causes low glycemic food to digest slower. It's the fiber! Processed Uncle Ben's has .6 grams of dietary fiber per serving while brown rice has 3.5 grams per serving. For the same reason brown rice takes much, much longer to cook breaking down the cellulose to make it palatable, brown rice takes much, much longer to have it's energy absorbed into the blood stream, the fiber.
When a person eats low glycemic therefore high fiber foods, they are getting the same amount of satiation per same quantity of food, but that fiber is passing through without being absorbed. So, people eating low glycemic foods are consuming less calories for the same level of satiation. That is the 10,000 ft view but it more complicated than that because different foods have different levels of satiation based on many things that are more than just physiological but also psychological.
The article says that high blood sugar levels lead to weight gain which isn't entirely true in most people. High blood sugar levels while the liver has stored as much energy as it can in the sugar analogue glycogen leads weight gain and eating low or high glycemic foods doesn't matter.
Things do get a little more interesting, and the science becomes a little weaker, when you start thinking about nutritional timing in the context of body composition instead of overall weight. For instance, muscle protein synthesis remains pretty constant in someone with protein at most meals. But you are able to "spike" it about once every 3 hours (the mechanism seems to have a threshold around 8g of leucine, after which it can't be spiked again for another 3 hours).
So in theory the optimal way to eat the same number of calories, all else being equal, is evenly divided into a meal every three hours you are awake.
But it's a micro-optimization and doesn't make a huge difference, and again the science isn't super well reproduced there. People certainly succeed at elite levels with many different meal timings.
> There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping
Night time is when humans are most hormonally active, and going to bed with an energy surplus will help engender a more anabolic state.
I can only speak from my own experience– but I'm a tall, skinny guy and if I don't eat for longer than a couple of hours, I start getting low blood sugar symptoms. My heart starts racing and I have trouble focusing or sleeping.
I did some reading about it, and I can't remember the exact science, but I think I read that if your blood sugar levels are too low, your brain worries that you'll go into a coma and it'll try to keep you awake.
Now that I wrote that down, it sounds a little pseudosciency, but that's consistent with my experience. Would love to hear from anybody who has a better understanding.
Eating a calorie-controlled diet is primarily a psychological challenge. They should therefore eat with whatever frequency and quantity they personally find makes sticking to a calorie-controlled diet easiest, whether that's eating 2 meals a day at 07:00 and 13:00, or eating 5 meals a day, or eating 1 meal a day at 21:00, or whatever works for them.
This is not convincing. According to [1] it seems like system glucose utilization is only about 10-20% lower during sleep.
Muscles store even more glycogen than the liver btw (~500g vs ~100g).
I rest my best after a nice dinner, whereas skipping it means that I'll take longer to fall sleep and more often than not end up waking up way earlier than I should.
.. which requires that lunch be the main meal, which could be difficult in countries where eating at your desk is normalised.
De-novo lipogenisis from sugar in practice does not happen humans. If you do something goofy like keep dietary fat under 5 grams and eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrate some monounsaturated fats can be synthesized, but it's fair to say that it basically doesn't happen.
Any fat on your body came directly from fats you ate. Sugar and carbohydrate only matter with regard to weight loss to the extent they displace fat metabolism.
In terms of fattening macro-nutrients, the rank would be fat > sugars > protein.
People keep ignoring this simple fact (that fat is already fat after all), yet argue endlessly about physiological stuff and ancestor mumbo jumbo.
In most normal people, meaning without diabetes and other metabolism problems, the liver doesn't immediately convert sugar to fat. Rather extra sugar is converted to glycogen which can be easily accessed for energy. What happens when a runner carbo loads the night before a race? The pasta she eats is coveted to glycogen and stored in the liver not to fat.
However, when the liver storage of energy is full, it then converts the excess to fat. Think about this for a second. The glycemic index and load don't apply because most people convert excess blood sugar to a readily available energy stored in the liver as glycogen not fat.
The problem is that Americans culturally never deplete the storage of energy in the liver because of two reasons; first, Americans snack all the time and drink sugary drinks, and, second, which I don't understand, we have developed an idea that we should eat huge third meals at night.
A big dinner will completely replenish the energy stores in the liver leaving excess sugar that will be converted into fat during sleep. Perhaps, it is smarter to eat a decent breakfast that contains simple sugars which are absorbed faster into the blood stream, a big lunch which will provide energy for the rest of the day, and a small dinner to satiate hunger.
For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping. And then in the morning break the fast.
There is no reason to have big dinners which are ridiculous.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycogen