The Science of One Meal a Day

By Roger A. Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Jun 27, 2012 - 3:02:09 PM

(FinalCall.com) - One of the most distinguishing traits of the followers of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad is their dietary prescription: The famous practice of eating one meal a day. For many, from the early 30s to now, this practice seemed too radical and even unreasonable and dangerous to the metabolism. After all, don’t Health Organizations promote three meals a day?

In fact, certain health gurus have suggested that eating several piece meals, during the course of a day, is the best dietary practice. Doesn’t this mean that dietary experts contradict the Honorable Elijah Muhammad?

Yes ... but that’s a good thing. Because an emergent volume of research is now coming out in the last decade or so, bearing witness, scientifically, to Mr. Muhammad’s Teachings.

According to American neuroscientist Dr. Mark Mattson, in a research paper he published in a British medical journal called The Lancet in 2005, eating one meal a day is the healthiest and most natural way of life.

Dr. Mattson believes that eating one meal a day or one meal every other day can actually cut calorie intake by 40 percent. He and other researchers also suggest that such a diet can serve as a protection against diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as against cardiovascular diseases.

It turns out that more research papers are bearing him witness, thereby confirming what the followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad have known for years.

A paper published in 2008 by the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology, University of California at Berkeley, showed how “alternate-day fasting regimens” significantly reduce cell proliferation rates. Where cell death is the essential cause of the aging process, the reduction of cell proliferation slows down aging altogether, by favouring the recycling, reducing and rebuilding of younger cells.

This is what we call Autophagy, or the ability of the cell to reduce, recycle, and rebuild into a new and healthy cell.

This, among other health benefits, is facilitated by eating only one meal a day.
Other great benefits of this lifestyle include insulin modulation and lowering insulin levels back to baseline.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad spoke often of the importance of His dietary Teachings for diabetes patients. We now have the precise biochemical reasons why he did so, as insulin deregulation is at the base of this ugly disease.

Moreover, through this regimen, it is found that a hormonal cascade takes place which can only occur when the body is in a state of fasting. The result is the elevation of growth hormones, in turn resulting in tissue repair, DNA repair, lypolysis, and even strength gains.

In fact, the latter benefit is one of the main reasons why fitness guru Ori Hofmekler promotes the one meal a day diet as “The Warrior Diet.”

His study and experimentation with one meal a day has been so successful that athletes like DC Maxwell, two-time Women’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champion, have openly endorsed it.

This shows, as Elijah Muhammad followers already knew, that such a lifestyle won’t make you weaker. It will make you physically, mentally and spiritually stronger. By promoting the body into an anabolic state, it triggers an increase of the hormone men so cherish, testosterone.

Furthermore, by constantly training and conditioning ourselves through exercising on one meal a day, with as little as 50g of protein daily (which should include protein from Navy Beans and Raw Milk), our body learns to optimize protein synthesis efficiency during longer periods of not having to digest and process food, thus making the best of it while allowing glucagon to do a better job of mobilizing fats for work.

That is why the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan once said that “every FOI” should be cut. There is no reason, if we exercise and eat one meal a day, why we shouldn’t be lean, muscular and strong men and women, as our ancestors were.

On the other hand, proponents of the several piece meals diet will be disappointed to know that a recent study came out this year, from the University of Ottawa’s Behavioural and Metabolic Research Unit, School of Human Kinetics, denouncing this diet.

It turns out this practice isn’t good for us at all, which confirms a point made by Dr. Mattson when saying that, “Our ancestors consumed food much less frequently and often had to subsist on one large meal per day, and thus from an evolutionary perspective, human beings were adapted to intermittent feeding rather than to grazing.”

In other words, Muhammad speaks the Truth! One meal a day or every other day is the most natural and healthy choice of diet for the Human Family of the Planet Earth.

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