There has always been a debate on how late you should eat dinner. Some people tend to go for the early bird special and they are done eating by the time 5 PM rolls around. Other people tend to eat late at night.
It seems as if Harvard Medical School researchers now have something to say on the subject. They released a study, which involved researchers from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, that says that it may be better if we eat earlier in the day and eat within a 10-hour window.
Cell Metabolism is the periodical where you can find the research that was published by those researchers. According to the information from the study, there are many factors associated with the time of day we eat, including our energy, appetite, and hunger. It can even affect how our body stores fat.
Nina Vujovic, one of the researchers and the author of the study, said that in the study, they were looking for an answer to the following question: “Does the time that we eat matter when everything else is kept consistent?”
In order to come up with the information, 16 overweight individuals were asked to eat meals on one of two different schedules. One took place earlier in the day and the second was four hours later.
As an example, one person might eat three meals at 9 AM, 1 PM, and 5 PM. Someone from the other group would begin the first meal at 1 PM, have the second meal at 5 PM and then finish at 9 PM.
Some of the factors that were reported by those individuals included their appetite and level of hunger. They also ran many tests, including checking temperature levels, and how much energy they were expending, and they took blood samples.
Biopsies of adipose tissue were also taken so they could compare them between the two different groups. They wanted to know how the body was storing fat as a result of when they were eating.
In a Harvard press release, a senior author of the study, Frank Scheer, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School said: “We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk.”
He went on to say that they wanted to understand why previous research had shown eating later in the evening was associated with increased body fat and risk of obesity.
Some preparation took place in the two or three weeks leading up to the study. The participants had to maintain a strict schedule of when they went to bed and woke up in the morning. In the three days directly before the study began, they followed identical meal plans.
According to the research, eating later in the evening led to some negative results. Calories were burned more slowly and there were signals that showed an increase in the production and storage of fat. If you were part of the group that ate later in the evening, you had twice as much of a possibility of dealing with hunger pains and you were less likely to feel full.
Vujovic said: “We found that eating four hours later makes a significant difference for our hunger levels, the way we burn calories after we eat, and the way we store fat.”
There were able to determine some interesting information as a result of the study. For example, the research showed a direct correlation between eating later in the evening and the risk of obesity. There may be other factors that were also associated and could be part of a different study, such as sleep and exposure to light.
Eventually, the researchers hope to expand the factors associated with the study to make more of a determination of what affects our likelihood of being obese.