2 Square meal to 4 Square meal...

By:- Boilal Gangte *

Living more then a decade in metros, the one complain I have as an urbanite (along with many of my colleagues) is the pollutions, unnatural and filthy surroundings, the congestion and the warm and sultry weather.

However, one observation is that I seem to have lesser complain in my general health in metros then back home and these seems to be applicable to many other as well. I tried to reason by comparing the weather, water and environment and it gives me more paradoxes because theoretically and also according to conventional knowledge I should be less healthy living in a city then in my hometown. But which doesn't seem to be according to my observation.

The only probable conclusion I can conjure up without any empirical study is that it's got to do with DIET.

Diet fundamentally consists of two components:
1. The diet items - The food materials
2. The dieting habits – How you consume those foods

The diet items:

There is more variety of foods in metro, be it vegetables, non-vegetables, pulses, grains, cereals, processed food, fruits, dietary supplements, etc. This is something which is endowed with a city because:

• The transportation is better hence getting food produce from different regions is easier.
• Most importantly, there is huge demand or the market is big hence it is commercially viable for traders or shops to stocks all types of items. Imagine if you were to get expensive exotic food item in a small place where there is very less demand, what will happen?
• Firstly, there will be very few takers and hence the food item will perish before it is consumed.
• Secondly, since the demand is slow the shop owner's money will be blocked for long duration.

This is inherent which cannot be replicated as desired. It can only happen once the city grows in size and the economic condition improves.

The dieting habits:

Dieting habits basically would be the way we eat our food. If we look at our dieting habits, traditionally we are a "TWO MEALS A DAY" culture. However, if you look at people in the cities, they would have at least "FOUR MEALS A DAY" – Breakfast, lunch, evening filler/snack and dinner. In fact in developed countries they have FIVE MEALS, ending with supper.

I'm sure the elite class might have already added lunch in the middle making it 3 meals a day but the general public still seems to confine with 2 square meals habits. But even for these 3 meals a day families, I still doubt how serious they consider breakfast as a meal or it's just another cup of tea and a couple of bread slices or some cookies to be just able to arrive till lunch.

Why the fuss about 4 meals a day when I can manage with 2?

Apart from my crude and inconclusive observation, if you happen to read or consult a dietician, the simple thumb rule according to them is "eat in lesser quantity but with more frequency". That's where my contest really comes from. So, this 4 means a day concept is not propagated because it is the lifestyle of the rich or because it sounds fancy, but because it is scientific.

The scientific explanation for this is in the way our body functions. The digestive system and metabolism are the two building blocks of human system.

• The digestive system converts the food taken into simpler molecules (amino acids, fatty acids and simple sugar)
• Metabolism converts these molecules into energy which is required for all our physical activity (including all the complex reactions inside our body).

Hence anything which is taken inside our body should be properly processed by these two systems. When this two system goes off the board then there is a problem.

Why a 4 square meal serves our system better then a 2 meal system?

Unlike our brain which processes any amount of information we in take, our digestive system has certain capacity of digesting food. That is the reason why when we eat more then our normal capacity or what we called overeat, we feel heavy and uncomfortable. On the other hand, we feel hungry faster if we do physical activity then be idle, because when we engage in physical activity our metabolism burns those digested molecules and hence our body is depleted of the human fuels (the digested molecules).

In a 2 meals system the gap between the meals are long, hence one's stomach is empty by meal time. The consequence of this is:

• Our digestive system secretes certain type of acid for digestion. Exposing our stomach to the digestive system without food materials to be digested can harm our stomach.
• Because we are hungry, we tend to over eat and hence the digestive system is not able to digest those huge quantities of food items.

Hence we end up being in a sub-optimal state most of the time:

• Hunger before meal
• Overstuffed after meal.

For the mind to function at its best, the physical body has to be in an optimal condition.

According to dietician the quantity food intake in meals should decrease as the days pass by, which means the first meal (Breakfast), should be the heaviest and the last meal (Dinner) should be the lightest.

The scientific explanation for the same is that as we wind up the day our physical activity diminishes and hence our requirement of calorie decreases. However in a 2 meals system the pattern is the opposite, we eat lesser in the morning but have heavy meals in the evening. The reason for this is because by the end of the day we have consumed all our food materials in our system through the day's activity and we are left with empty stomach.

As always, it's easier said then done, I'm sure it's not going to be an easy task to change our habits not just because we are used to having 2 meals a day but also because a 4 square meal will always be more expensive then maintaining a 2 square meal a day. And considering the plight or our economic situation it will always be tough to spend more from our monthly budget, especially for the general masses.

However, we need to start thinking about ways of how to spread across our two heavyweight meals over a more frequency.

Maybe, for starters:

1. 1. Let's try to have one more meal sometime at noon. This will give us the energy needed for the second half of the day.
2. Let's also have small filler sometime before dinner to reduce the heavy evening meal.
3. I've not heard any language/dialect which has different name for meals, we just called it morning or evening meal. The only line we have is "Have you taken your meal?" We need to first name them.

For the mind to function at its peak, the body should not give any hiccups.

Adios!

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* Boilal Gangte - Originally from Churachandpur now working at ICICI Bank in Mumbai. You can see other writing stuffs through his blog The writer can be contacted at boilalpg(at)aol(dot)com
This article was webcasted at e-pao.net on 18th October 2009.

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