Lionel Messi’s nutritionist has revealed how many meals a day you should eat to lead a healthy lifestyle.
It can be difficult to know if you’re eating too much or too little, but Lionel Messi’s nutritionist has revealed the exact number of meals we should eat per day for a healthy lifestyle, while debunking the ‘five meals per day’ rule.
Ismael Galancho is a Spanish nutritional consultant who works with the iconic Argentinian footballer. Taking to La Formula Podcast, he broke down how often people should be eating full meals, and pointed out some flaws with other nutritional myths and assumptions.
The health professional explained: “The best thing is whatever suits your daily routine. Today, we know that meal timing isn’t that important. We’ve been using the famous five meals a day as mandatory for decades, and today, we know it’s not necessary.”
Healthline explains that some nutritionists and health experts recommend eating five smaller meals throughout the day to consistently fuel your body and to ‘prevent your metabolism from slowing down’.
But Messi’s nutritionist disagrees with the five-meal rule, reports Surrey Live.
He continued: “How you distribute the number of meals isn’t that relevant; it’s completely secondary. It doesn’t matter how many times you eat a day, but what you eat at those meals.
“So I say: distribute it based on your day, whether it’s more convenient for you to eat more meals, more food, or less.
“I’m not a big fan of eating too many meals unless you’re an elite athlete, but I’m also not a big fan of eating just one meal because most people can’t consume the calories they need in a single meal; they’ll probably fall short on micronutrients.
“It’s difficult to achieve the amount of vegetables and fruits you need to eat in a single meal to meet your daily vitamin and mineral requirements because it’s quite high.”
Pointing out flaws with the five meals per day approach, Galancho added: “If you can do it, great. But it seems unlikely, and studies tell us this.
“I normally recommend eating between two and four meals, depending on your daily routine and your context. A sedentary person isn’t the same as someone who trains or is an elite athlete. If you’re an athlete, depending on your training, you’ll need to eat more times a day.
“The important thing is what you eat and how much you eat, more than when. The only thing we have to keep in mind when we eat is that we eat during daylight hours.
“We know that eating at night is counter-evolutionary, and it’s not 100 percent clear, but people who eat very late at night or who eat in the early morning tend to have worse metabolic health.”
Healthline debunked the idea of eating frequent, smaller meals to increase a person’s metabolic rate. They shared that while digesting meals does raise a person’s metabolism slightly, it is the total amount of food consumed which determines the amount of energy that is given through digestion.
They then explained that eating three meals of 800 calories will have the exact same effect as eating six meals made up of 400 calories, so consuming a higher number of smaller meals is unlikely to make a huge difference.
According to Galancho, the average person can live a perfectly health life by eating between two to four meals per day, as long as they are receiving all of the nutrients that their body needs.
Meanwhile, the NHS doesn’t set a limit on how many meals a person should be eating daily – but it emphasises that everyone should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables per day.
The NHS also explains the importance of eating meals high in fibre, adding dairy or dairy alternatives, ingesting proteins, eating unsaturated oils and spreads in small amounts, and drinking between six to eight glasses of water every day.
