The theory of evolution as proposed by Darwin holds that humans have evolved over millions of years from more primitive life forms. The evidence in support of this is overwhelming compared to the very tenuous evidence to support creationism which holds that the earth and every single living thing on it was created about ten thousand years ago from nothing. The earliest life forms can be traced back 350 billion years.
Earliest humans can be traced back to a few million years ago and over that time the evolutionary process has made numerous subtle changes such that we now have our best chances of survival. The intention was that only the fittest survive but the adverse conditions that were encountered by primitive man are rarely encountered in today’s civilised societies. Nevertheless, these mechanisms still exist in the human body and are recognisable as homeostatic mechanisms. That is biological processes that operate to ensure that our bodies are functionally optimally.
The free availability of food is a very recent phenomenon on this vast time scale. It is only in the last few hundred years that our food has been provided for us by other humans namely farmers. Before this time individual humans had to go out and gather plant food and hunt for animal food on a daily basis. Hence, we were known as hunter-gatherers.
The contemporary custom of three meals a day is really very new and certainly the human body and its homeostatic mechanisms did not evolve to handle food in this way. Perversely the current eating habits of most people in civilised societies should be seen as abnormal and this goes a long way to explaining why the human body has effectively been drawn away from the point where it is functioning optimally to a position where its survival is compromised.
I was not there at the time but I am fairly certainty that primitive man did not get up in the morning and say “right what’s for breakfast?”. Guess why? Because there wasn’t any. He spent his whole day hunting and gathering his food which he would then take back to his family and they would sit down and eat this in the evening. And the biological systems that exist within the human body have evolved to handle food exactly in this way.
His ability to store food evolved as a failsafe mechanism such that when he went for periods when there was no food at all, he would then have a backup. If this backup system did not exist then he would simply die and the species would come extinct in a very short period of time. This storage facility of course still exists but because we are very rarely in the position where food is scarce the backup system is no longer really required.
Nevertheless, the fact that is still exists explains why we continue to deposit adipose tissue as storage at times when food is plentiful and this explains the mechanism of the development of obesity. To counter this, we have to revert to how the human body utilised its energy sources, namely to fast for a significant period of the day – this explains how intermittent fasting is the most efficient and biologically proven method of achieving and maintaining your biological optimum weight.