The underlying variable here is meal size, not meal count. You can easily eat thousands of calories in a single meal every day given it's what your body is used

The underlying variable here is meal size, not meal count. You can easily eat thousands of calories in a single meal every day given it's what your body is used to instead of 3 separate meals and it's often even cheaper to plan for (going so extreme with the freuqency isn't necessarily without downsides though). For simplicities' sake though let's make the assumption every one of this 38% not eating 3 meals a day are also actually eating that much less overall food each day. This seems to be more what the article is trying to assume anyways, so it's easier to talk about that way. At this point the article still isn't quite claiming what you took from it. The 38% is the percentage that responded "regularly" or "sometimes" to the question "I no longer eat three meals a day". At the same time only 12% reported "being hungry but skipping a meal" in the last 6 months. The majority of that 38% aren't thinking they don't have the amount of food they need. While any % of the European population will be many people it's not necessarily the only thing the article contains. It's also worth noting here are subgroups with many people (e.g. parents) cutting how much they eat to feed their kids fully at uneasily high numbers though.