Hello, I'm Monica Reinagel, and you're listening to the Nutrition Devo

podcast. This week we're talking about meal frequency and whether

eating six times a day instead of three will help

you lose more weight or burn more fat. A lot of people believe that eating more frequently boosts your metabolism.

I debunked this in the first year of the Nutrition Diva Podcast, which was, can you believe

it, 10 years ago?

The research that I reviewed back in 2008 for my episode on metabolism myths

simply did not support the notion that you could burn more calories by dividing your daily intake into smaller more frequent meals. But our understanding of human nutrition is constantly evolving and it's always worth revisiting these stances in light of

newer evidence. In his book The Abs Diet, David Zinchenko claims that eating six meals

a day will help you reveal that six pack

that you'd like to flaunt. Due to inflation we do now strive for an eight pack but

back then an abdominal six pack was considered sufficient.

You have to eat more if you want to lose more he writes in the book

and there's science to support the fact that more meals work.

And then he goes on to cite two specific studies to prove

that eating more frequently will help you burn more fat. One of these studies, which is from the year

2000, involved nationally ranked 15-year-old

gymnasts and 26-year-old runners, all of whom were female.

The study didn't actually look at how often the women ate.

Instead, it was looking at the difference between calories consumed

and calories burned on an hourly basis throughout the day.

And they found that the athletes who replaced the calories

...