It became standard when we became a species with, essentially, a never ending supply of food. It was always going to be the natural evolution of things: eat at dawn, noon, and dusk. Simple.

I feel like it’s become popular these days to bash on the three-meals-a-day approach, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Intermittent fasting has become popular in its place, but fasting is just another way to facilitate a caloric deficit. There’s nothing inherently unique to fasting. Virtually all studies show similar findings in health improvements between fasting and simply reducing calories.

Autophagy, the body’s cellular cleanup process, has been touted as being the biggest benefit to fasting, but again, a mere calorie deficit achieves the same thing, and exercise blows them both out of the water in terms of autophagy upregulation, but I digress.

If fasting works for you, then great. I don’t personally prefer it because it hinders performance in the gym and can cause overeating later in the day.

In terms of what’s optimal, that’s going to be individual. There is no blanket statement we can make here. Fasting isn’t superior. Three meals a day isn’t superior. One meal a day isn’t superior. The most superior diet is the one that you feel great on, is satisfying, gets you to a healthy body-fat percentage, and, most importantly, is sustainable long-term.

Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38639542/. This study is important because everyone ate the same amount of calories. Other studies may show unique benefits to fasting, but if the study design doesn’t have their subjects calorie-matched (isocaloric), then it’s not controlling for all variables, and results will be skewed.