My understanding of the theory behind the 5-6 meals a day is it keeps up your metabolism.

Humans are grazing animals according to our teeth, stomach and long small intestine. We are built to go field to field eating or grazing.

If you are eating the proper foods, complex carbs, then it takes about 2-3 hours to move through your stomach. When you go more than 4 - 5 hours your physical brain (sub consious) says "dude were starving must be a famine start storing fat". This then triggers the "starvation mode" which slows down your metabolism until you can start eating again when you get to the next field or whatever.

After we start eating again it takes a few meals to calm down the starvation trigger and speed up the metabolism again. The physical brain wants proof that there really is a good supply of food before he/she recinds the order to stop storing food (as fat).

The snacking side works well with the theory above, but I don't like snacking. Our culture is a culture based on snacking, music, tv, ... When we eat snacks it screws up the digestive cocktail in the stomach, causing undigested food into the digestive track.

More importantly we are creatures of habit and snacking kills the eating routine. When we go into automatic mode we usually keep doing what we have in the past. With a good routine of eating only meals and no snacking we keep on track without much if any effort.

I think everything else in your post is spot on, though.

Thanks, great post.