It's probably a cultural thing. In India...We ate after 8 all the time. 6.00 is when you get the last installment of caffeine..as tea or coffee. But then again, we were not allowed to come back home until after sunset. Play outside till sunset, homework time afterward, dinner and then a little walk/tv time and then off to bed. Elsewhere...Asian outdoor markets thrive until midnight. In my suburban town in America, everything is dead by 8. It's a tad depressing actually.
it may not lead to weight gain but is still healthy to eat late dinners?<p>If you have chronic acid reflux (GERD), eating late makes it worse (acid comes back up when you lie down after a meal)<p>Eating late can also lead to worse sleep as your body is spending energy digesting food rather than repairing itself.<p>Personally I feel much more refreshed the next day, when dinner is around 6pm and when it is the lightest meal of the day. Practical issues aside, i cant think of any health benefits eating a late dinner.
There obviously is a link between the span of eating and your weight. But it's not as big, when you eat large quantities of food.<p>If we are talking about obesity it means that it took years to put someone in that state. Eating 300-500 of unhealthy kcal less, by decreasing the eating span just delays the problem.<p>I do agree though, that the shorter eating span the better. It's called intermittent fasting and there are promising results coming out from research on that.
There was a paper published recently (within last year or two) that looked at the time between first meal and last meal of the day in mice. In general, they found that the shorter time between first and last meal had a significant correlation on weight loss. For example if the time between breakfast and dinner was 10 hours instead of 14 hours, the 10 hour mice weighed less than the 14 hour mice, even on the same diet.<p>I can't find the citation right now but if I do I will edit the comment.
My opinion is the amount of time spent eating (and not when you eat) is a major contributor to lower obesity rates. When you spend more time chewing and conversing, you seem to eat less and get fuller. Typically you can't even finish your meal.<p>In NA we eat to quickly not giving our brain and stomach time to send the proper signals of fullness. Try it sometime, take a typically portion and spend 20 minutes not eating more than half of it. You probably won't be able to finish it.
"The lead author of the study, Dr Gerda Pot, is a Visiting Lecturer in the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division and is also based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She said: ‘The findings of our study are surprising. We expected to find an association between eating later and being more likely to be overweight but actually found that this was not the case. This may be due to the limited number of children consuming their evening meal after 8pm in this cohort."<p>So the study is far too small to have the power to come to <i>surprising</i> conclusions, and should probably be retracted.<p>Also, Science Bulletin has very annoying popovers that will drive the audience away.
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So the last time I had put on weight (an accident -> was bedridden for long) I decided to fix my food intake along with running and sports. One advice I received from a dietician was that have dinner at least 2 hours before you go to bed and I followed it. I don't know whether it was other things that worked too or only others worked but I felt a clear difference in my fitness, sleep pattern ("very" uninterrupted), digestion, and mood when I woke up the next morning.<p>On a side note, when I was S Korea - dinner happened at 5pm and I could never get used to it :-)
When else are they going to eat?<p>I was once a serios competative swimmer (think top 100 in the US). If i ate between school at say 4pm and training at 5, that dinner would have been floating down the lanes. After 8pm was the only option. (Same for breakfast. Eat after training, on way to school.) Properly active kids eat when they can. Nobody should skip exercise or other activity for the sake of some silly 1950s eating schedual.
I was a small kid and my kids are small. I've always found late dining to be uncomfortable as I'm too hungry. Thankfully, it isn't cultural in the areas of Canada and USA where I've lived.<p>Does anyone have any experience where adopting later dining improved happiness or health? What changes did you make? How did you adopt it?
I'm curious-everyone who is doing the contrarian "But I never eat before 8pm/whatever"-where do you live? Also its a bit of a straw man to make 5pm your early eating time-I usually eat between 6 and 7-is that abnormally early? I also tend to get to work earlier and leave earlier as well.
Perhaps there's a spurious link - the kinds of families who eat after 9pm are also the kinds of families who eat too much.<p>Maybe. I have zero evidence, not even a circumstantial anecdote. But perhaps that's where theories like this come from.
The article cites major caveats -
1. Cohort size of children eating after 8pm is much smaller than before - mostly because the kids are in bed by then ( they are looking at 4-10 year olds )
2. Self reported Food Diaries are seldom accurate.
3. This study is the first of it's kind.<p>Supper timing is majorly correlated to weight gain, especially if most of the calories are from carbs. Simple rules like NCA5 or NCA6 ( no carbs after 5pm ) easily influence weight loss in teens & adults. I wouldn't try this hack with 4-10 year olds, but once you are in the teens, it is a nice simple body hack.
I think the problem is not really about eating late, but more of eating a large meal and going to bed right away.<p>I don't know about it making you gain weight, but I know I wake up tired and my heart rate tracker shows it being much higher then usual.
Unfortunately, some people are going to read this wrong. For example: I know some folks who have "second dinner" after 8 pm. Their children are definitively obese, and I can see them citing this study as a reason to keep eating "a meal called dinner" after 8 pm.
Some people are advocating to have the largest meal in the morning, then a medium meal in the afternoon, and a light meal in the evening. (I could not find a good reference, it's something I've encountered several times in blogs).<p>Anyone here following such a regime, and does it work in controlling weight and feeling healthy?
Obesity isn't the only thing though. Skipping dinner or breakfast is a form of intermittent fasting.<p>I think intermittent fasting improves lifespan. It is a form of calorie restriction. People I know even do water diets to repair bones - but that may be a bit extreme.<p>However, this is probably not good for children. Their bodies need to grow. What we really need is to feed them healthy food instead of the processed crap found now in many stores. The explosion of sugars and HFCS in everything probably contributes to the diabetes / weight problems for kids today.