Snacking is so ingrained in modern culture that an entire industry has been built around it. Perhaps you missed National Potato Chip Day on March 14th celebrating the stunning statistic that Americans consume 1.2 billion pounds of potato chips annually. Can snacking help or hinder your efforts toward Super Health? Should I eat every three hours, every two hours, or perhaps not snack at all? Is the standard “three square meals a day” sufficient for good health?
Best-selling author and natural health and nutrition expert KC Craichy tackles these questions and adds simple, cost-free strategies to help improve the health of you and your family that you can incorporate today.
Audio Transcription
Welcome to LivingFuel TV. I’m KC Craichy. So, you’re supposed to eat five or even six meals a day to optimize your metabolism, right? Not so fast. I want to share some facts with you today that might change your thinking in that regard.
Now this is very entrenched in the mindset of athletes and dieters alike that we’re going to give you five small meals or six small meals and somehow that’s going to stoke your metabolism and it’s going to keep you from being anabolic and going catabolic, which means losing muscle. If you continue to eat so often, you won’t lose muscle because you’ll keep amino acids in your bloodstream. That is the theory. So, here are the facts.
Food digests at different rates, as does protein digest at different rates. When you eat say 60 grams of protein in a meal, if you chew it properly, let’s just say it’s meat protein, if you chew it properly, it’s going to take one to two hours before it starts releasing amino acids into the bloodstream. Now based on which kind of protein source you’re talking about, protein typically digests at the rate of six ten grams an hour after the amino acids are being released into the digestive system. So if that is the case, 60 grams of protein, at the maximum of 10 grams an hour, is 6 hours worth of amino acids in the bloodstream. So if you could tell me how that is going to increase your metabolism to eat again two or three hours after you ate that protein source to somehow keep your amino acid status high, no it does not make sense. It does not pass the common sense test. If you have these amounts of amino acids in your bloodstream and then fuel yourself for six hours, like we just talked about, and do it again, there is no way to go catabolic or in a muscle-losing phase during that amount of time. So, it just simply does not make sense.
So, about snacking, what do we do about snacking? Because many people will eat breakfast, they get hungry late morning, and they’re looking for the snack machine or a doughnut or coffee or something like that to get them through to lunch. So, the first problem normally is people did not eat the right breakfast, because a breakfast of oatmeal and orange juice is a guaranteed snack late morning, because you’re sending your blood sugar and insulin levels flying and then they basically come down in a couple of hours, and when they come down below the level where they started, it puts a physiologic demand on your body that says you will get some more carbohydrates or some kind of stimulant to get your blood sugar back up.
So consider this, a breakfast like we talked about, the American breakfast, cereal, orange juice or a Pop-Tart or whatever the case may be. Now your blood sugar goes from a morning, let’s say 89 level of protein when you wake up, and then you eat this breakfast and it shoots up to say 100. So, your blood sugar is high, insulin flushes and pushes your blood sugar back down, and in a couple of hours your blood sugar may be even lower than when it started. So, you get a little shake and you get a physiologic demand on your body to get some more carbs. Now if you back, back up to that breakfast, and have say a whole meal super smoothie or something to that effect that has high protein and all the fiber and nutrients you need to fuel you all the way to lunch, then you have a slower rise in blood sugar, but it comes down more slowly and doesn’t cause that jerk in the blood sugar levels that requires you to get a snack.
So, the point is if you fuel yourself properly at your breakfast meal, at your lunch meal, at your dinner meal, then you will not be looking for snacks three hours later, and this is the key. So, if you’re saying to yourself, hey, I like the breakfast I eat and then at 10:00 I have this certain snack, then consider this: take everything you eat after the breakfast meal or the lunch meal or the dinner meal, everything you eat after it, take and pull back to the mealtime. So, that snack that you normally would be having later in the day, pull it back and have it within an hour of the meal, like a dessert for instance. Hopefully, it’s a healthy snack. Then allow your endocrine system to do what it does, rise, slowly fall, and then when your blood sugar comes back to baseline, from that point until the next meal is the maximum fat burning mode. Now that is important to dieters and athletes alike.
So, hopefully this information is helpful to you. God bless you and have a great day.
