Active Low-Carber Forums - Late breakfast and early dinner helps to fight flab

Quote:

From The Times
London, UK
30 August, 2018

Late breakfast and early dinner helps to fight flab

Delaying breakfast and bringing forward the time you eat dinner may hold the key to a leaner physique.

A study found that people who delayed their breakfast by 90 minutes and had their final meal of the day 90 minutes earlier than usual lost more than twice as much body fat on average as those in a control group who maintained normal meal times.

The research is the latest to look at “chrono-nutrition”, the voguish school of thought that when you eat might be as important as what you eat.

For ten weeks the subjects on the modified timetable of meals were not allowed to eat outside of a daily window that began with breakfast and ended with dinner. There were no restrictions on what they could eat inside those limits. However, those who changed their meal times ate less food overall.

The findings also hinted at improved cholesterol levels and better blood sugar control, which might guard against type two diabetes. The study, by researchers at the University of Surrey, was designed to explore the effectiveness of time-restricted feeding (TRF), which demands that food only be consumed during strictly limited hours.

Its proponents have suggested that eating late at night conflicts with our natural biological rhythms and that our hormones, the bacteria that reside in our guts and other aspects of our digestive systems are primed for processing food during certain periods of the day.

Studies of TRF regimes on mice found the animals reduced their bodyweight despite eating as much food as they normally did.

The new research on humans involved only 13 subjects, which limits its usefulness. It was designed to gauge whether TRF is worth exploring in larger, more expensive tests. It was also designed to reveal whether people would stick to a TRF diet that might require them to eat at different times from the rest of the family. “We can do the cleverest experiments ever but if people can’t apply them to their lives it’s not a lot of good,” Jonathan Johnston, who co-authored the study, said.

The researchers found that people on the TRF regime cut their daily energy intake by about a third. Over ten weeks they lost between 2 per cent and 3 per cent of their body fat. Most of the subjects reported snacking less and a diminished appetite. However, their weight stayed about the same, possibly because they decreased their activity levels. The control subjects who did not change their meal times lost about 1 per cent of their body fat.

The results, published in the Journal of Nutritional Science, did not suggest an ideal time for breakfast and dinner. However, other research has suggested that the adage “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper” may have something to it as we burn more calories and digest food more efficiently in the morning.

A slender majority of the participants — 57 per cent of them — did not feel that they could have maintained the new meal times because of their incompatibility with family and social life.

Dr Johnston said that the study “provided us with insight into how slight alterations to our meal times can have benefits to our bodies”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-flab-2xg20zgfz