Nearly 42% of adults in the U.S. are obese, a condition that can lead to serious health problems like diabetes and cancer.
Most of us have heard that we shouldn’t eat late at night, but researchers haven’t fully studied how eating late affects our body weight.
Scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital took a closer look at how the time of day when we eat can change our appetite, the number of calories we burn, and the way our body stores fat.
Their results were published in a science journal called Cell Metabolism.
The main researcher, Dr. Frank A. J. L. Scheer, wanted to understand why eating late at night could make us gain weight.
Past studies showed that people who eat late often weigh more, have more body fat, and have a harder time losing weight. But the question was, why does this happen?
Dr. Scheer, another researcher named Dr. Nina Vujović, and their team worked with 16 people who were overweight or obese. These people followed two different eating schedules.
One schedule had them eat meals early in the day, and the other schedule had them eat the same meals but four hours later.
Before they started, everyone in the study kept a strict sleep schedule for two to three weeks. For the three days before the study, they all ate the same foods at the same times.
In the lab, the researchers checked the participants’ body temperature, how many calories they burned, and how hungry they felt throughout the day.
The scientists even took small samples of fat tissue from some of the participants to see if the time of eating changed how the body stores fat.
The results were surprising! When people ate later, they felt hungrier and their bodies burned fewer calories. They also had lower levels of a hormone called leptin, which helps us feel full.
On top of that, eating later seemed to change the way their bodies stored fat.
The fat tissue was more likely to grow and less likely to break down. All these changes could explain why eating late might make us gain weight.
The researchers want to include more women in their future studies. They also want to see how the timing of meals affects when we go to bed.
They hope that their research will help us understand more about obesity and how we can prevent it.
As Dr. Scheer explains, “This study shows the impact of eating early versus eating late. In real life, many things like sleep, activity levels, and even sunlight can affect when we eat and how our bodies respond.”
If you care about nutrition, please read studies about the harm of vitamin D deficiency you need to know, and does eating potatoes increase your blood pressure?
For more information about health, please see recent studies about unhealthy habits that may increase high blood pressure risk, and results showing MIND diet may reduce risk of vision loss disease.
The study was published in Cell Metabolism.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
