Meal Frequency
Meal frequency is a topic that gets brought up a ton within our community. We have heard the more meals you eat the better because it will boost your metabolic rate, which has zero science to support. Now we have the camp of one meal a day and fasting being promoted all over the place. I recently heard Peter Attia on a podcast talk about one meal a day fasting protocols leaving subjects with more body fat and less lean tissue than when they started.
New Research
A recent study by Taguchi et al. 2021 looked at 3 meals per ay versus 6 meals per day in an isocaloric period to see what affect it would have on body composition change and appetite during weight gain. The subjects were rowers at the university level so well trained athletes, but a small sample size of 10. This is not uncommon when you recruit more highly trained subjects. Each participant completed both protocols and each protocol lasted 8 weeks each with a 5 week break in been each protocol. The diets had each subject consume 20kcals per kilogram of body mass and averaging around 5200kcal per day. There was no significant difference between groups in body composition and none in appetite.
What's Important to Know?
This is another study that shows a meal frequency of 3-6 meals seems to be a good place to at. When looking at the literature it seems the biggest driving factors of what meal frequency would be best for an individual will be the on that allows for optimal protein distribution throughout the day. If you are consuming 1.8-2.2g/kg of protein which is recommended for athletes you will want to evenly break that up throughout the day to make sure you are at least getting 20g of protein with each meal to each leucine thresholds. The bigger you are the more meals you may need to make sure you get all your protein needs and to also make sure the meals are not so big that they cause GI distress.
GI distress would be the second most important thing to consider when thinking about meal frequency. Some athletes can handle huge meals and not skip a beat and others have to eat smaller meals especially around training windows to make sure they are digesting things properly.
The next thing you want to think about is the meal frequency that fits best with your schedule of daily life activities and training. Training 1x a day may not result in a huge need to time meals but it never hurts. Training multiple times per day is when the meal frequency and timing can truly play a huge role.
Dig Deeper
This is just a quick overview of the literature as there are a ton of rabbit holes you can go down on meal frequency. If you follow the three important guidelines above I think you will be good for 99% of situations. If you need more nuance I would recommend looking through the literature a bit more to find that sweet spot for you.
References:
Taguchi M, Hara A, Murata H, Torii S, Sako T. Increasing Meal Frequency in Isoenergetic Conditions Does Not Affect Body Composition Change and Appetite During Weight Gain in Japanese Athletes. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2020 Dec 25;31(2):109-114.