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If there’s one thing we know about Americans, it’s that we’re snackers.
According to a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism last week, just being awake means that you’re probably eating.
This study was done on healthy San Diego residents, and found that while they eat healthy, they basically snacked, nonstop, for all of their waking 15 hours.
In fact, they barely left any time between snacks.
The study was done to see if leaving larger chunks of time between meals would lead to weight loss.
The argument before was that this was a moot argument anyway, since Americans eat three meals per day.
The study found that this was grossly untrue.
Study participants were asked to snap photos of what they ate every time they ate. Each photo had a time stamp so researchers could analyze when and what they were eating.
As it turns out, the data they received found that there were no defined breakfast, lunch, and dinner times for almost anyone involved in the study.
People began eating about an hour and a half after waking up. Then, they’d finish a couple hours before bedtime, with no breaks longer than one or two hours. 25 percent of calories were eaten before noon, and 35 percent were eaten after 6PM.
That’s not a great spread of eating habits. But knowing when, and how much, Americans eat is just another tool in the fight against obesity. Now that we know that the myth of three meals a day has at least a few cracks in it, we can see where the unhealthy eating habits lie and target them in public health efforts.
