Does Eating More Smaller Meals Mean Absorbing More Calories?

Because your basal metabolic rate increases during meals, eating five or six smaller meals throughout the day rather than three means you burn more and absorb fewer calories. If you eat junk food, though, eating this often makes it easier to overeat. Healthy eaters, however, absorb fewer calories than junk food junkies because of the thermic effect of food. They also receive significant health benefits by eating more often than breakfast, lunch and supper.

Basal Metabolic Rate

Your BMR, the rate at which you burn calories at rest in order to perform all body functions, accounts for up to 70 percent of the energy you expend each day. Since eating requires additional processes to convert food into energy and nutrients, your BMR increases during the ingestion and digestion of food. As a result, eating more smaller meals causes you to absorb fewer calories from the foods you eat. Conversely, skipping meals or dramatically reducing your caloric intake through severe dieting decreases your BMR.

Junk Food and Calories

While eating more smaller meals of junk food creates the increase in your BMR, the highly refined grains and sugars found in junk food digest far quicker than other foods, which increases your blood sugar level quicker. This rapid increase often triggers an excessive release of insulin, which solves one problem by creating another. Too much blood sugar gets removed from your blood, creating a feeling of hunger. And as David Ludwig, M.D., director of obesity programs at Children's Hospital in Boston says in an article published in the October 2003 issue of "Consumer Reports on Health," "When blood sugar is low, in the battle between the mind and the metabolism, the metabolism usually wins," meaning you eat more than planned and absorb more calories.

Thermic Effect Benefits

Eat any food and you create an increase in BMR. Eat healthy foods and you also increase TEF, the energy required to break down food into nutrients and energy. Eat a meal that's a mixture of protein and complex carbohydrates, for instance, and you use more than 20 percent of the calories to digest and absorb the rest. Eat a junk food meal that's mostly a mixture of fat and simple carbohydrates, though, and the TEF drops to about 5 percent. Make all your smaller more frequent meals healthy ones, and the reduction in calories is significant. While a poor 3,000 calorie per day diet might only lose 300 cals to TEF, a healthy one of the same amount might lose 420 cals. In one month, that change alone results in the loss of 1 lb.

Health Benefits

Besides burning more calories, eating healthy frequent smaller meals provides other health benefits besides natural weight loss. In "Eat More, Weigh Less," Dean Ornish, M.D., cites a 1989 study published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" where two groups of subjects were fed the same type and the same amount of food, but one group consumed the food in three meals and the other nibbled the entire day. In two weeks, the nibblers had reduced blood cholesterol levels by over 15 percent, cortisol levels by 17 percent and insulin levels by 28 percent.