Once you read this column and recognize the similarities to the last two, you might call me a one-trick pony. If so, I won't care.

But I will share the following story as an explanation of the duplication of the duplication - and my attitude.In junior high, I attended five five-day basketball camps run by Pete Carril, a brilliant basketball mind who coached Princeton University at that time. In those 25 sessions, I bet I heard Carril or other coaches say, "See the man, see the ball" and "Pass and cut away" 500 times.The first command was the core of Princeton's defense; the second, the key to the offense. While both concepts were lauded at the time for allowing less-gifted players the chance to defeat superior athletes, at first I thought it was presumptuous of Carril to only introduce youngsters to The Princeton Way.By high school, however, I had changed my mind. I realized that those maxims served as the foundations not just to Carril's but many of the best basketball philosophies. In fact, before my playing days were through, I counseled or coached at more camps than I had ever attended and probably shouted out those same sayings another 500 times.The multiple moral of the story: 1.) Fundamentals can never be stressed enough; 2.) the most profound sayings have unlimited application.Because of that, I see no problem in once again writing about more seemingly contradictory health-related research where my final advice to you is as simple yet as crucial to your health as "See the man, see the ball" is to any Carril-influenced defense.Before explaining the new study, let's review the work done in 2012 by Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor at Salk Institute. He fed mice a high-fat diet - but half of the mice consumed all their calories every day in an eight-hour window. The other group consumed the same number of calories without any time-of-day restriction.The end result? Those consuming all their cals in the eight-hour window gained less weight and fared far better in blood-work tests to ascertain general health.As a result, the Salk Institute did a follow-up study, which was published in December 2014 in Cell Metabolism. It not only confirmed Panda's first findings, but it also found the same to be true when the eight-hour-eating window was expanded to nine, 10 or 12 hours.In the second study, the researchers took 392 male lab mice - some obese, some of normal weight, and all beginning the human equivalent of young adulthood - fed them the same number of calories a day, but altered the time frame of the eating windows as well as the compositions of their diets. Expectedly, the mice allowed to eat as much food high in both sugar and fat whenever they wanted gained the most weight.Yet the mice allowed to eat as much as they wanted of the high sugar, high-fat feed for only nine hours a day only gained half as much weight.Think about that again. Over 38 weeks, two groups of mice ate bad stuff to their heart's content, but because half were only allowed to eat for nine hours a day, they only gained half as much weight.The second study also recorded less weight gain if the eating window was expanded to 10 or 12 hours. Only when the window was expanded to 15 hours a day did the recorded weight gain approximate the amount registered by the mice eating as much of the bad stuff as they wanted any time of the day.Many in the medical community saw the Salk Institute research as a potential breakthrough in the battle against obesity - and then the University of Southern California recorded contrary results published last December in eLife. At USC, researchers once again limited the time rodents - this time, rats - could access food.Eventually feeding time was restricted to a four-hour window followed by a 20-hour fast. Once this occurred, ghrelin, the hunger hormone, really began to kick in.Humans produce ghrelin, too. In both rats and humans, its secretion communicates to the brain to stimulate the appetite. In the aforementioned study, this communication caused the rats to eat twice as much as they had been eating once the four-hour eating window was established. Scott Kanoski, the lead author, explained that "this is an adaptive response to limited food access," in essence, the same response that allowed the cavemen to eat and eat and eat once they finally killed a woolly mammoth or whatever.We no longer need that ability in the modern world. Unfortunately, our bodies still react like the cavemen's.At least, according to this round of research. The Salk Institute study, however, suggests otherwise.So that leads to a mildly amusing question - Are you more like a rat or a mouse? - and an answer I've given on many occasions. Because optimal diets are as unique as snowflakes, you need to experiment on your own to find out the eating pattern that works best for you.