This just in:

Increased meal frequency does not promote greater weight loss in subjects who were prescribed an 8-week equi-energetic energy-restricted diet.

Well, nothing new here really, but it bears repeating: a high meal frequency does not speed up metabolism or fat loss. Another nail in the coffin for that tired old myth.

Since this is a fresh study, there's always that tiny glimmer of hope that it might get picked up by mainstream media. Just the other day I had the great misfortune to come across "expert" fat loss advice in one of the news mags. Yup, there it was again, the importance of stoking the metabolic furnace with meals every second to third hour. How predictable.

Anyway, here's some highlights from the fulltext version of that study;

"...The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected."

"...We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis."

"...According to the present results, increasing meal frequency did not change the daily profiles of peptide YY or ghrelin, nor did it favourably impact appetite parameters."