It showed that the majority of people eat over a span of 15 hours or longer each day, with less than a quarter of the day’s calories consumed before noon and more than a third eaten after 6pm.
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And while most people started out with good intentions – eating yogurt in the morning, for example – researchers found that people also started in on chocolate and candy at 10 a.m. and continued eating sweets the rest of the day.
Primed with evidence of how long people eat each day, senior author Doctor Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Salk Institute’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory in the U.S., along with first author Shubhroz Gill were able to test whether reducing the daily duration impacts health. “For example, [a] cream-cheese-Cheeto squash [or] wheat crusty by using fried trek mix”.
“[It’s] a very easy way to reign in people’s eating”, she says. [9 Snack Foods: Healthy or Not?]. People also ate throughout the entire day.
The study was published September 24 in the medical journal Cell Metabolism.
The result appears to be a formula for steady weight gain and metabolic disturbance. He and his team previously studied animal eating patterns.
The study found that most folks were eating for 15 or more hours while awake, and the lion’s share of calories were eaten well after 6 p.m.
The study also looked at whether the app could help with people wanting to eat for fewer and more consistent hours.
The app was free to download, but could only be used by people who had signed an informed consent form. But even though Panda’s initial study is over, the MyCircadianClock app is still available for download, and research is ongoing. “Accordingly, we all have developed a timing system or circadian clock to turn on and off thousands of genes at the right time of the day to tune our physiology and metabolism”.
The result: Although no one had been instructed to change the kind or amount of food they normally consumed, the obese participants had cut back their daily calories by about 20 percent by the end of the four-month study period. Instead, all they did was restrict their eating hours while continuing to log their food and drink in the app. The photos were timestamped so the researchers knew when they were eating, as well as what and how much. The intake of calories is maximum among those who snack at night, averaging around 1947 calories after nine pm at night.
After 16 weeks, assisted by a weekly “feedogram” showing their dietary intake patterns, each lost an average of 3.5 per cent of their excess body weight and reported feeling more energetic and having slept better.
In addition, the data revealed cultural food practices, such as Americans’ consumption of coffee and milk in the morning, alcohol in the evening, and tea throughout the day.
While there had been food studies done in the past, they tended to focus on what people ate, rather than when. They wished to test and answer the question whether restricting the period of eating could be efficient in weight loss. Eating close to bedtime may not be as healthy as cutting off food earlier in evening. And diet and circadian rhythm are tightly linked. The app will help record intake of food, water, beverages, and supplements and, after two weeks, reveal the user’s own “feedogram”.
“We have evolved to eat during the daytime”, he said.
A follow-up experiment tracked eight participants who were classified as obese and who had a habit of consuming food for periods stretching beyond 14 hours each day.
Researchers at the conference were also interested in replicating the study in Europe, India and Japan, he said.
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“Lifestyle is a combination of what we do and when we do it”, Panda explained.
