Nibbling off the weight

Press, 28 August 1978, Page 12

Nibbling off the weight

A lot of overweight people tend to eat little during the day, but crowd their intake of food into one good meal in the evening — as well as eating into the small hours afterwards.

Not long ago, in six medical laboratories in London, Tokyo, Bonn, Toronto, Geneva, and - New York, rats were devided into two groups. Group A had food all day, and Group B had food for a couple of hours only; and Group B soon learned they had to eat all they could in a short space of time. After a month the rats in Group B were 50 per cent heavier than the light, but frequent nibbiers of Group A.

And when they were allowed to follow the same eating habits as Group A they were reluctant to do so, but just kept on gorging.

Further examinations of the rats which had been eating regular meals showed them to have more body fat and arteryclogging material than the nibbiers.

Experts warn that not all findings concerning rats also apply to humans. Even so, they believe that we can learn useful lessons from the rats’ ways of eating. Dr Lars Holsten, of the University of Oslo medical school, says that eating heavily at regular times of the day is the most fattening routine there is. But if you intend to be a nibbier, he says, then don’t nibble and eat three normal meals.

Not everyone restricts his food intake to separate meals. Eskimos, islanders of the Pacific, certain tribes in Borneo, New Guinea and Africa, and farm workers in the Donetz and Ukraine basin, where they’re noted for long living, all nibble. After years of being condemned as a sure-fire way of putting on unwanted weight, nibbling, ra ’ --.- than eating three meals a day, is now gaining increasing support among dieticians as the natural way to eat. They point out that

humans are the only creatures on earth who restrict themselves to regular eating hours. The rest eat when they’re hungry, and that’s pretty well all the time.

Tests with rats, carried out by Japanese nutrp tionists, have shown that wen the animals are left to themselves they nibble sparingly day and night. The moment they are given three hefty portions of food a day they put on weight, tend to suffer from heart-trouble and shortage of breath, and increase the amount of cholesterol in the arteries.

The expert in charge of the Japanese tests, Dr T. J. Tahijo, of the University of Tokyo Medical School said: “A meal, as we understand it, is artificial, and quite out of keeping with the way our ancestors ate.

“For they, like rats, were inclined to eat frequently but sparingly. Heavy loads of calories produce excess fat, but frequent small loads are burned up almost as soon as they’re digested.” Dr Tahijo would like to see a complete change in our eating habits. “Instead of three meals a day with tea and coffee breaks, we may end up eating six or seven small meals a day — and losing weight,” he says.

Many nutritionists agree that a heavy evening meal is not good for a person.

But, nowadays, feeding by social custom has usually replaced the more natural way of eating by inclination ... and so more than 60 per cent of people in the industrialised world are too fat.

Backing up the nibbiers is a report in the medical magazine, the “Lancet,” from a group of Soviet doctors who made a study of more than 400 men between the ages of 60 and 64, divided into two groups.

The group on four or five meals a day proved healthier than the ones on two and three hefty portions daily. Fewer were overweight, fewer had high cholesterol levels and there were no reports of diabetes. Three-quarters of them were exceptionally hale and hearty. In another experiment, conducted by Professor Robert Mahler, of the Welsh National School of Medicine, students were asked to eat up to 50 per cent more than their normal intake.

Eaten during three meals per day, the extra food put on up to 101 b of weight in three weeks. But when the food was divided into eight small meals and eaten at one-and-a-half intervals, the weight gain oyer three weeks was negligible.

Those subscribing to the nibbling theory say that ply by eating more often but not so much.