What is best meal frequency for lean muscle growth? Popular thought seems wrong?!

Hi Andy

The six meals a day recommendation has the advantage that you always eat before you become hungry (getting hungry usually results in over-eating and making bad food choices). It also is more effective for young guys who need to eat a lot of calories, as they can't get adequate calories from three meals usually. Small frequent meals also do keep blood sugar more stable because blood sugar and insulin go up or down relative to how many carbs you eat - so fewer carbs more often means lower peaks and shallower troughs in blood sugar levels.

However, the amount of calories and the types of food you eat are more important than when you eat them. There is some research to show that more frequent, smaller meals are better for staying lean but the evidence isn't overwhelming like it is for higher-protein, lower-carb diets.

So if you can still make intelligent food choices, eat enough calories and protein to grow and repair muscle and not over-eat on 3 meals a day, you can probably do quite well on that eating program...but I still generally recommend more meals.

As far as what athletes do, some are quite strict and listen to good diet advice (although many don't have access to good diet advice) and some don't pay enough attention to their diets. With the amount of calories they burn, they can often get away with not eating properly. However, one thing I've noticed is that the guys who's careers last the longest are the guys who eat well.

Thanks for reply, makes a lot more sense.

Just in regards to blood sugar levels. The study I mentioned before compared blood glucose levels in 3meals vs 6meals. Marcronutrients were the same for each subject group and blood glucose levels were measured every 15 mins from 7am to 7pm. Findings were that the group recieving 3meals had consistantly more stable blood sugar levels. Now dont think it was relatively large study but only found one study of this kind. Dont know if you found anything contidicting these results?

Yes, I'd like to take a look at that one also.

Insulin and blood glucose can be measured in different ways - area under the curve (AUC), absolute, mean, median, etc, so it would be very interesting to see how the glucose was measured and just as importantly the associated insulin flux!

Hello, Sorry took so long to reply as usual when want to find them, you can't.

This is study mentioned before, integrated area under the curve (AUC) concentrations for glucose and plasma insulin was used as form of measurement. Just re-read abstract and realised that they used corn syrup so sure that would affect blood glucose levels. Interesting read recent material indicating that our body metabolises corn syrup differently to normally glucose so dont know if this effected results. Diets were fairly low protein meals, in which blood glucose level attenuated when protein was increased.

http://www.e-spenjournal.org/article/S1751-4991(10)00054-5/abstract

Also another I found different aspect but just interested on your views if you have time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10578205

I personally don't agree with the necessity to eat 5-6 meals a day. There is no strong evidence to support that it has any effect on the metabolic rate, when compared to eating the same amount of calories in 3 meals. I've been doing a lot of reading regarding this subject, especially with the recent boom in intermittent fasting. Maintaining blood sugar is a priority, however, because of this, the body has developed efficient pathways that will make it happen even under extreme conditions.
If you were to fast for 23 hrs and then go for a 90 min run at 70-75% VO2max, your blood sugar after the run would be identical to the same run performed after eating a meal. It takes at least three days or 84 hours of fasting to reach blood sugar levels low enough to affect your mental state and even this is temporary, as your brain adapts to the use of ketones. Studies have shown that during 48 hours of fasting, or severe calorie deprivation, blood sugar is maintained within a normal range no measure of cognitive performance is negatively affected.

If you're taking in enough calories & you're training correctly you will get muscle growth.

Hi Andrew

Corn syrup is a low glycemic sugar (mostly fructose). So it has a much less dramatic effect on blood sugar than glucose, sucrose (table sugar), and many starches (like maltodextrin, waxy maize, white bread, rice, etc). However, fructose has been associated with higher production of fat in the liver (called hepatic lipogenesis) and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (an increasingly common disease associated with being over weight). So although low GI foods are generally considered more healthy and better for fat loss, fructose is an exception to this rule.