Good journalists always follow stories as new information surfaces come up, and good bloggers should be good journalists. Thus, this little nugget from The New York Times regarding the Taco Bell invention, "Fourthmeal."
Last week I wrote that Fourthmeal appears to be creeping into our popular lexicon, but that most young people still associate the term (if not the practice) with Taco Bell. Chalk one up for marketers.
But the argument has been made by Taco Bell executives and their hired marketing guns that Taco Bell wasn't necessarily promoting an extra meal, but that it was promoting a good place to eat if a person's final meal came late in the evening.
So some researchers decided to ask this key question:
If a person eats a normal amount of food, but just happens to eat some of it late in the evening (early in the morning), what difference does it make in that person's health?
The answer: Eating immediately before bed appears to be a bad idea.
According to Dr. Louis J. Aronne in this health feature from The New York Times, it has to do with triglyceride levels, metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. In layperson's terms, if you eat before bedtime, the calories you consume will likely be stored as fat.
As with many medical conundra, though, there are others who argue total caloric intake is all that matters.
"It's a simple rule - it's calories in and calories out," Steven Aldana, a researcher at Brigham Young University, told the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger last year. "But if you are having four full meals during the day, you are going be storing excess calories in the form of fat. It's just the law of physics. If your calorie content is too high, that's going to contribute to excessive weight, which is not something we need a whole lot more of in the United States."
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2 comments:
There was a health and nutrition book in my 3rd grade elementary school classroom. I vividly remember one of the most important nutritional lessons advocated by the book: eating a lot and then going to sleep to dream about eating more food (depicted in adorable illustrations) is considerably less healthy than anything else you could possibly do to your body. Clearly, the researchers were reading this book!
What will the fast food industry think up next? It's kind of horrifying to see some of the ad campaigns that these companies produce. Good post; I only hope that we as a society can pick up on what the real messages behind these types of ads are.
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