Abstract
Nocturnal meal-feeding studies on rats with a certain diet at several frequencies per day gave mostly similar results to those previously reported in daytime meal-feeding studies. But, the increased accumulation of body fat, which has been reported in rats fed once at the daytime, could not be observed in rats fed once at the darktime. This suggests the importance of study on nutritional consequences of feeding patterns. Being unsuccessfully conducted, the nutritional consequences were compared between the two different feeding patterns which might daily provide an equal amount of nutrients to rats who had the food life of 3 meals a day ; a feeding of the same diet at 3 meal times vs. an alternate feeding of 3 differently composed diets. The meaning of this type of feeding patterns in nutritional researches was discussed.
