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  #1   ^
Old Mon, May-20-19, 01:02
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default Should you stop eating at night?

Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
20 May, 2019

Should you stop eating at night?

Not all scientists agree that when you eat makes a difference to your health — but recent research doesn’t look good for late diners


As Jerry Seinfeld once demanded incredulously of his elderly parents, “Who eats dinner at 4.30?” It was a joke in the 1990s, when an early dinner became laughable to people who mattered. Early dinners were for the infantile (nursery tea); the infirm (NHS hospital dinners are slopped at 5.30pm so kitchens can close); the very old; northerners; and the working class. There was nothing glamorous about the early bird.

By contrast, the late dinner was rock’n’roll; for those back from Tuscany where “we were the first in the pizzeria at 10pm”; the self-important professionals on the last train; networking dinner parties where no one seems to think of leaving until 1am, for the love of God.

Tony Blair changed some things, but most of all teatime. In the decade since 1997 the average British family shifted its dinner later by two hours, to 7.47pm, according to a survey by Jacob’s Creek. Early dinners are now for the poor, the weak, the left-behind. Yet they will inherit the Earth because eating late may be killing us.

“When’s dinner?” That is an annoying question asked in my house about 387 times a day. Yet when we eat dinner is turning into one of the big debates in nutrition. Our fashion for later eating, which we imagined was not only sophisticated but imitating the gnarly old Mediterraneans, has coincided with the rise of obesity and diabetes in a way that may be no coincidence. Not just what you eat, but when, could be the neglected ingredient in our fat disaster. Yet a recent Japanese study showed old folk eating just before bedtime and doing fine. I asked the experts: do we need to swallow our pride and eat tea with Nan and the kids?

“I eat until six and then nothing after that,” the actor Hugh Jackman said in a television interview of his regimen to get ripped for playing Wolverine. His wife, sitting next to him, rolled her eyes. “It’s a disaster for the social life . . . getting to the restaurant before the witching hour.”

First, the case for late dining. In Japan there is a folk belief in leaving two hours between food and bed, so much so that from middle age regular health checks admonish the Japanese on this point. However, doctors realised that this rule was not evidence-based. When they studied the old people who did sleep soon after eating, they found, as they wrote in BMJ Nutrition, “contrary to popular belief, ensuring a short interval between the last meal of the day and bedtime did not significantly affect [blood glucose] levels”.

Next: what time did our bodies evolve to eat dinner? Peter Ungar is a professor of paleoanthropology specialising in diet, and the author of books such as Evolution’s Bite. “No other primate has discrete meal times,” Ungar told me. “Meals are distinctly and uniquely human things.”

Our early ancestors ate as apes, Ungar says, moving through the forest and chowing whenever they encountered food. In fact, that is similar to the average westerner, who, studies show, grazes for 15 hours a day, often starting with a milky brew and ending with a chaser of crisps during the late-night box set. My bedtime ritual includes a pat-down for cracker crumbs, which feels disgustingly bestial, and it is. A study of rhesus monkeys in 2006 suggested that humans could snack round the clock because those monkeys “who ate most of their food at night were no more likely to gain weight than monkeys who rarely ate at night”. Grazing was, a decade ago, a diet fad; is this how we are designed to live?

Then came change. Humans began to hunt big game and to tame fire, so dinner at base camp was born, says William Leonard, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Illinois and a diet specialist. The invention of meals was a big deal for humans, he says, and was “associated with the emergence of large brain and body sizes, and the expansion of hominids from Africa”.

The trouble is, we can only guess when they ate. Leonard says that studying forager-farmer societies across four countries, from Peru to Siberia, revealed that they tended to eat a “main meal in the afternoon. The evening meal was generally less substantial, often tea, bread and leftovers.” Yet mealtimes were in flux. Siberians ate later when the sun set after midnight, while the Peruvians ate more often in harvest season. “All this would suggest that it is unlikely that there is a single ‘optimal’ time to eat dinner across all humans,” he says.

Not so, says Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute in California and the author of The Circadian Code. He runs the Regulatory Biology Laboratory (aka the Panda Lab), where his experiments in circadian rhythms have made him famous. Panda is not so cautious about our ancestors’ dinner time. He says the fireside meal was “the cradle of civilisation”, where we developed culture and higher orders of thought. “All of that probably happened up to say 8pm or 9pm, and not much beyond because fire was expensive.”

Panda recently visited the Masai in Kenya and looked at the “other side of the story”, which is that “they are not waking up and putting food in their mouths. They have to wait at least a few hours before they gather fruit or milk the cow. So that’s the difference we have now: we send our kids to school after having breakfast at 6.30am and we stay up to midnight eating; you have stress at both ends.”

Of course, Panda is conjecturing about early humans, but his studies point to the idea that our digestive system wants to work a day shift. It doesn’t like to labour more than eight hours; after that it does its job poorly. For example, Panda recruited obese people to eat only between 10am and 6pm, although they could consume as much as they liked in that window. They lost 2kg of fat in three months and had a big fall in insulin resistance.

“Studies over the last 40 years have shown late-night meals cause more blood sugar spikes than early-morning equal-calorie meals. It used to be called ‘evening diabetes’,” he says. As soon as you take your first calories of the day in, say, a milky coffee, your body clock starts “cranking and has less than ten hours to work”. The effects are, he says, like smoking, slow to show up, but generally will start to make you ill in ten or twenty years.

What about those much-vaunted Spaniards and Italians who eat so late? “There was one epidemiological study from Spain where people actually eat really late. It showed that people who eat after 9pm, which there is very normal, have 25 per cent higher risk for breast cancer for women and prostate cancer for men.”

Panda also speculates that because Spain is geographically more in line with the UK than its official time zone, in terms of sunset times that would be the equivalent to a risk of eating anything after 8pm here. So if that were true, the average Brit would be sitting down to eat their main meal just 20 minutes before they should be stopping all calories for the night.

The Frommer’s guide to Spain reports that “the chic dining hour, even in one-donkey towns, is 10 or 10.30pm”, and the same goes in other Mediterranean zones that we are so often told to copy. Is their good diet protecting them from their late hours? Panda says he does not know. Although it is useful to note that a study of the centenarians of the so-called blue zones, the longest-living populations, which include Sardinia and Greece, found that they all shared a preference for light dinners.

Panda is keen to stress that the evidence on these processes is still limited; how far, for example, these effects are influenced by nightfall or when you woke or started eating in the day. Several studies have indicated that eating earlier rather than later, and in a restricted time frame, is better for weight control, blood pressure and blood fats. Panda is, by the way, scathing about the happy conclusions of the Japanese study mentioned at the beginning: even though the changes in the late-eaters’ blood sugar were slight, “if they continued rising at that rate, in three years those people would be pre-diabetic.

“The net total of epidemiological data is people who eat late at night are at higher risk of chronic disease.”

That was certainly the finding of a recent scientific report from Brazil. Last month researchers from the Sao Paulo State University published a study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology that concluded that those skipping breakfast and eating late were four to five times more likely to die within a month if they had a heart attack. It should be noted, though, that other research has found that those with such dining habits are also more prone to smoke and do less exercise, contributory factors to poor life expectancy.

Still, Panda has changed his habits. He interrupts his work to get home to eat early. “Even my 16-year-old daughter is finished eating by 6pm and doesn’t have any food until the next morning.” His colleagues, he says, have also moved to a late-breakfast, early-dinner model. I keep trying to glamorise this way of eating by calling it “brunch-dunch”, but Panda doesn’t seem to think I can make it a thing.

The “brunch-dunch” (still no?) early dinner is exactly what was going on in the Middle Ages, when moralists were most disdainful of round-the-clock snacking; the British public were expected to stick to two meals. Francis I of France, who reads like one of the first lifestyle bloggers, wrote that his ideal regimen was to “rise at five, dine at nine, sup at five, and couch at nine”. That 16th-century plan is, half a millennium later, called “time-restricted eating” and is all the rage with Californian biohackers — oh, and Joan Collins, who says an eight-hour window for eating works for her: “I’m not exactly fat.”

Hmm. The old adage “breakfast like a king, yada yada” normally gets trotted out right now, but it doesn’t help because modern culture is against us. I remember at a certain stage of child-rearing only having the time to sit down to eat past 9pm, minutes before I needed to go to bed. Even now, the idea of being nil by mouth from 6pm, during the only relaxation period of my day, does not spark joy. Likewise the prospect of working parents having dinner at their desks as well as lunch.

Michael Mosley, the doctor and TV presenter, finds the early dinner studies convincing. “One possible explanation,” he says of the British obesity epidemic, “is that we’re shifting our calorie intake later and our bodies do not enjoy that.” He says a three-hour fast before bedtime seems like a good idea, but while he has outlawed eating beyond nine or ten, he hasn’t managed to stop by six.

“To be honest, it’s unsociable, by the time we all now get back from work. It’s a compromise, in the end, between what the science is telling you and how you actually want to live your life.”



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...night-5xt9k535x
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  #2   ^
Old Mon, May-20-19, 02:55
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s93uv3h s93uv3h is offline
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Old Mon, May-20-19, 04:28
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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I love the notion of our digestive system as a determined shift worker.
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