eating

[Jeroen]

Hi Mark,

Maybe this is a little bit of topic for this forum but I'll try it anyway.
I know that you recommend eating 200-400 calories above maintenance level to support muscle growth and drinking a gallon a of milk a day but what is your opinion on eating multiple, smaller meals all day long? There seems to be a common consencus/belief in the fitness community to eat five to seven meals a day. The meals are supposed to be small and healthy, of course.

Does the following answer (which is opposite to this consencus/belief) from dr. De Vany make sense?

Dr. De Vany: Many meals per day reduce insulin spikes a bit, but by substituting a nearly constant flow. Hence, total insulin is increased over the course of the day eating six or seven meals. This will make you more resistant to the action of insulin. Hence, your body must make more of it.
As your insulin drifts upward and you become resistant, you're on your way to the Metabolic Syndrome X: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, and a pre-diabetic state. No wonder a number of bodybuilders develop diabetes.
The overweight people and bodybuilders tend to share a common strategy (or failure) of eating many meals a day. Both have problems. The obese have many and bodybuilders manage to avoid some of them because they have such high activity levels. But, they both tend to die of similar diseases ? diseases of metabolism.
The characteristic that links both these sets of individuals is that they both lack variation between the anabolic and catabolic states. They have a flattened and somewhat uniform metabolic state. The obese do little and eat steadily so that they seldom vary their metabolic state; they're almost always in the anabolic (growth) state.
Bodybuilders who fixate on maintaining a positive protein (nitrogen) balance only enter the catabolic state when they work out. Fortunately, they tend to work out often and long, so they do enter the catabolic state for that period of time. But they ingest a meal soon after the workout and then go back into the anabolic state. This is bad.
It's also a hassle to eat that often. It's hard enough to eat three meals that you prepare well with fresh ingredients. Finally, you weaken the growth hormone response you get from exercise and when you fall into REM sleep. ".

Thanx.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Yeah, it's off topic.