New research suggests eating early and within a 10-hour window is healthier | Hacker News Reader

New research suggests eating early and within a 10-hour window is healthier

medicalxpress.com

68 pointsBrajeshwar56 comments

Seems like the thesis might be true for overweight individuals. This might be key information missing from the title.

as per the article:

“Researchers had 16 overweight patients…”

I would suggest to suffix the title with “for overweight individuals”

This article lists three studies, one with sixteen overweight, one with thirty overweight, and the 137 San Diego firefighters study that was posted within the last week.

This falls into the "safe to ignore useless new research" articles that are constantly spammed out all year every year forever: - battery technology - eating / nutrition - alcohol consumption trends

Isn't this the classic working schedule? Breakfast at 8, lunch at 12:00 and dinner at 18:00. I think it minimizes snacking

I think dinner times can vary a lot, based on the cultures in each country/region. Meal times in general, I suppose.

Oof. I'm not sure this is an optimization I can go for. I feel good running a bit low during the day. I don't know how I could get enough calories in to stay sane, without having to eat too many of them early in the day or break my fast too soon when I inevitably get hungry at night.

I guess it probably is psychological like everything else. Maybe a light breakfast at 7am, a healthy dinner at 4pm, that's still a decent fasting window? I prefer to fast throughout the day though (I'm still actively trying to lose another 20lbs).

I've heard the "early" window is better than late. For me, this is very difficult because I want to eat dinner with my family (who all eat breakfast at different times). I still seem to have reasonable success with a 17/7 window that's roughly noon/1p to 7/8p.

Does anyone else have experience with the differences between early and late windows? Or ways to make early windows feasible with a family?

I wouldn't trust it. Tons of Europeans eat early and very late and are perfectly healthy.

Very late as in after midnight?

No but like 9-10pm for dinner which is significantly later than North Americans typically eat and definitely far beyond a 10 hour window for all meals.

Until studies are reproduced in places like Spain, we won't know if they could be even healthier. And if studies cannot be replicated, that is interesting too as it could help narrow down why intermittent fasting approaches show benefits in other populations.

I’m in the same position. Need to eat dinner in the evenings for family reasons. Social elements of food are significant.

> Social elements of food are significant.

But easily changeable. Nothing stops you from sitting at the table and having a good conversation, all while eating an apple or two and a glass of water.

Eating an apple would ruin a fast, and there’s also a risk of giving your kids eating issues because they don’t realize that your nutritional needs are different from theirs.

Nobody wants to eat a meal prepared hours ago and reheated. Beyond that, most people feel really uncomfortable being watched by a non-eater while they are eating; if you eat at a different time than your family at least let them eat in peace.

Although new studies are always interesting to some extent I find it extremely surprising how some people are still very surprised by things which we already knew for a very long time.

Since I was a wee boy I remember being told that the healthiest eating pattern is a substantial breakfast, a warm lunch and a light dinner and you shouldn’t eat before going to sleep, just like you shouldn’t eat before heavy exercise or going swimming. There are numerous health benefits to this and they have all been talked to death so why are we still researching something that we already have the answers to?

A warm lunch? How does temperature have anything to do with it?

It's more about cold dinner. Theory is you are more likely to over eat a warm meal.

So if you are going to keep to having a warm meal a day. Make it lunch.

> Theory is you are more likely to over eat a warm meal.

Eating all your meals cold might be a reasonable approach to weight loss. Wait, did I just invent a new diet fad?

Your body covers the energy overhead to break down food into usable energy supply, ideally ending with a net positive. Warmer food presumably makes the digestion a little less costly. Cooked meat is definitely more rewarding (energy-wise) than raw meat (because it costs less to digest), so maybe warm food is a heuristic for cooked food as well.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of ages doesn't qualify as science. I'm not agreeing with that, only explaining how are modern paradigm is anything but humble.

Another example is cultures with rituals involving psychedelics. Western-based values dismissed those practices. Until now. Now we have Western-based "proof" of the usefulness of mind-altering substances.

If anything seems to "defy" science, it is really just that it concurs with it or hasn't yet been scrutinized by it. Those examples are also the few that survive to the current day - much like "all the music in the 70s was good." No it wasn't, most of it was terrible, and thus no one bothers to remember it.

And re: Western values, there is indeed some circumstantial entanglement with science, but they're not one and the same. If humanity got wiped out tomorrow, the next intelligent cultures to evolve after us would discover science again. They would not discover any of our religions, customs, or values.

It's very worthwhile to recognize these facts, and it has nothing to do with hubris or humility. Science is discovery, not a personal trait or belief system.

> Science is discovery, not a personal trait or belief system.

Science the theory? Yes.

However, in reality science is practiced by flawed and biased humans. Humans that are influenced by the nature of their context. And then the proof is measured against that paradigm.

Slightly off topic, I listened to this yesterday

"Lera Boroditsky. She studies how the structure of the languages we speak can change the way we see the world."

The point being, science - which depends on language - in practice isn't immune to influence.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/watch-your-mouth/

Activity after eating puts the sugars in your muscles rather than your fat cells right? Or no?

No. Having enough energy in your body speeds recovery, which eating helps with, but storing vs burning fat is almost purely down to calories in vs calories out. You can end up storing less fat by using energy to recover (intentional) damage to your muscles, or by just spending it (increase calories out) but that equation is still all that decides which way the valve flows.

That makes sense, burning is what makes a difference. I was just under the impression that some glucose is put in your muscles for ready use, to push your "cliff" further out, rather than being stored in the same cells that would take them if you were to be sedentary.

Glucose is stored as glycogen in the liver/muscles and is used during intense exercise afaik. So you might be right

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was created by a marketing campaign for Grape Nuts. Doing research into it seems like a very good idea, rather than just trusting "intuition", especially if it may just be an echo of that marketing message and not biological evidence.

https://bettermarketing.pub/how-marketing-created-the-most-i...

Nutrition research is hard, mostly reliant on self-reported or animal studies, and the quality has been low. I am happy to have more repeatable and ethical research done to help better understand what really drives our biological systems.

I recall when I was younger, I used to deliberately follow this advice - "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." However, it looks like having a "big" breakfast doesn't make any difference unlike what the traditional wisdom suggests.

From the linked article:

If you try to eat earlier in the day, making breakfast your biggest daily meal may not be so important, suggests another study, published in Cell Metabolism last month. Researchers had 30 subjects who were overweight follow two four-week diets: one with 45% of the day's calories in the morning, the other with 45% of the day's calories at dinner.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the University of Surrey in England had expected those who had a big breakfast and small dinner would burn more calories and lose more weight. Instead, they found no differences in subjects after they followed the two meal patterns.

Our corner of the world also has a similar saying: "Keep the breakfast for yourself, give half the lunch to your enemy, and let them have the dinner."

However I have a sneaking suspicion this grew out of generations of peasants who needed almost 5 digit daily calories early in the day to sustain their backbreaking farm labor, and helped along by moralizing against lazy people who would get the village in trouble with the local lord or the imperial tax collectors.

That’s interesting! I see how the manual labor will require higher caloric intake in the morning.

Even if we know something to be true, proving it to be true is often the first step in answering “why”.

Once we can prove it, we can test it and experimentally isolate the key components. This is, for example, how willow bark lead to aspirin.

I found doing business in Spain ok except they don't seem to eat until about 10pm. That was a real struggle for me - 6pm is my choice.

And interestingly, from personal experience, Spaniards are not a generally overweight population despite eating a late dinner plus a typical breakfast, lunch and even merienda (afternoon snack). What gives?

I guess this thread discusses 2nd order effects. The most important factors are still the food you eat (Mediterranean diet in this case) and the number of calories (portion sizes).

Mostly the calories. Number of meals is a non sequitur, especially with the insane caloric density of the typical American meal.

I feel like a study like this comes out three times a year and still somehow gets a headline. Anyone have a link to a meta-analysis?

Yes, it is fantastic how people are reproducing scientific studies now, and even building on them. Just recently there was a study on firefighters and a question comes up about eating early or late in the window. And now, here is a study that looked at that exact question. It seems reasonably likely the next similar headline will be a meta-analysis, since we seem to have had a spate of studies recently.

Eating less (than the recommended 4 meals per day) seems beneficial too. Lunch at 12 and dinner at 18 seems to work very well.

4? Is "tea" its own meal where you live?

I've only said "fourth meal" ironically as it's part of a Taco Bell marketing campaign. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then getting Taco Bell at 2 am on a weekend.

Do people work until 2 am on weekends? I've done it only occasionally, but if it's becoming a common thing, we should look into solving it, and not by having a 4th meal.

Third shift exists, yes. But also, work wasn't mentioned or implied, unless you mean the taco bell workers.

I've always been perplexed by those hours. Having a good breakfast, then having lunch between 2 and 4 seems much better (you can easily stretch that to make it after work, at 5:30 pm or so), as they do in Latin America. Then dinner is optional.

If I eat breakfast I'm ravenous by 2:00, if I don't eat breakfast I am only a bit peckish at 2 and proper hungry by 4. Eating breakfast regularly also has the downside of causing me to wake up hungry.

No thanks.

> Researchers had 16 overweight patients eat the same exact meals on two schedules: one with meals earlier in the day and the other with meals about four hours later in the day.

That’s all I need to know to stop reading. Drawing conclusions from n=16, on the latest edition of the journal of bogus research.

Doesn't mention anything about autophagy, does not align with my worldview.

In all seriousness I'd love to have a big breakfast but I'm too lazy to do it most days. The days I go out to eat for breakfast I end up doing light snacking for the rest of the day because I am so satiated.

Very cool. I guess the takeaway is eating a big meal right before sleeping is not ideal for losing weight (but could be a good strategy for those looking to gain).

Does anyone have a link to the paper?

I found a similar study from 2020: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdfExtended/S1550-4131(...

EDIT: I _think_ https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(22)... is the paper, but this article is kind of blog-spammy.

Paper Summary:

Late eating has been linked to obesity risk. It is unclear whether this is caused by changes in hunger and appetite, energy expenditure, or both, and whether molecular pathways in adipose tissues are involved. Therefore, we conducted a randomized, controlled, crossover trial (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02298790) to determine the effects of late versus early eating while rigorously controlling for nutrient intake, physical activity, sleep, and light exposure. Late eating increased hunger (p < 0.0001) and altered appetite-regulating hormones, increasing waketime and 24-h ghrelin:leptin ratio (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.006, respectively). Furthermore, late eating decreased waketime energy expenditure (p = 0.002) and 24-h core body temperature (p = 0.019). Adipose tissue gene expression analyses showed that late eating altered pathways involved in lipid metabolism, e.g., p38 MAPK signaling, TGF-β signaling, modulation of receptor tyrosine kinases, and autophagy, in a direction consistent with decreased lipolysis/increased adipogenesis. These findings show converging mechanisms by which late eating may result in positive energy balance and increased obesity risk.

Highlights:

"Specifically, late eating significantly increased the odds of a >50 response on the VAS scale of how much a participant would like to eat (p < 0.0001), of reporting a desire to eat starchy foods (p < 0.0001) or meat (p < 0.0001), and of reporting a strong desire to eat (p < 0.0007). There were also increases in reported desire for salty foods (p < 0.0051), dairy (p < 0.034), and vegetables (p < 0.036)."

"During the 16-h wake episode, late eating decreased average leptin by 16% (p < 0.0001) and increased the ghrelin:leptin ratio by 34% (p < 0.0001), consistent with the increased hunger probability during that time, while during the 8-h sleep episode, late eating increased average leptin by 10% (p = 0.0028), decreased ghrelin by 13% (p = 0.0002), and decreased the ghrelin:leptin ratio by 18% (p < 0.0001)."

"Taken together, our results suggest that late eating caused a decrease in energy expenditure across the 24-h cycle, although future studies are needed to verify this."

"...late eating significantly increased waketime hunger, decreased 24-h leptin, had no significant effect on 24-h ghrelin, decreased waketime energy expenditure, and decreased 24-h CBT."

(and lots more -- study is quite interesting)

New headline. "Small underpowered study is published"

This might mean something as part of a meta analysis, but means nothing here.

Just tired of this shit. I'll eat whenever I feel like. STFU.

I encourage you to.

HNers and SV tech bros have a generally disordered view of food from my perspective. I think I'm a little sensitive to it because many in my family and wife have had eating disorders.

Food is for enjoyment as much as sustenance. Focus on learning to cook and having a joyous relationship with food of all types. If you start with rules and numbers, you're missing the forest through the trees imo.

People don’t seem to understand yet the far more powerful (and much more complex) mechanisms for weight loss and gain.

1) Gut microbiome - the flora and fauna can be affected by antibiotics and probiotics, and also when you travel. For example kids given antibiotics early on become more overweight throughout life.

2) Meat and factory farms - they overuse antibiotics, and the older the animals you eat, the more effect it has on your own aging process.

3) The brain’s ability to burn calories AND regulate the gut brain too, through neuron pathways, is still poorly understood. But it might be a factor of mind over matter: https://nypost.com/2022/09/01/the-secret-to-weight-loss-coul...

4) Cutting out processed sugars, bread/starches and a lot of other artificial bullshit. Check out Jordan Peterson opening up about his all-meat diet. He and his famoly had many things clear up that were considered incurable, including arthritis and depression.

https://www.doctorkiltz.com/jordan-peterson-diet/

>2) Meat and factory farms - [...] the older the animals you eat, the more effect it has on your own aging process.

You're in luck because modern factory farming has made it possible to raise animals in record time. Chicken are slaughtered as early as 6-7 weeks old[1], and beef you get at the grocery store is probably slaughtered between 12 and 22 months[2].

[1] https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/How-old-are-chickens-used-for...

[2] https://beef-cattle.extension.org/what-is-the-age-range-for-...

Wow, I didn't know this. Based on your second link, a large number of calves are grown on grass pastures. It seems that in other scenarios, though, they are held in tight conditions. How can we tell which is which when we buy the meat?

https://www.americancattlemen.com/articles/backgrounding-cal...

My main concern is that the calves live a comfortable life and get to do what they want in the grass, and when they're slaughtered it's all over quickly. It seems a high energy diet would give them a lot more energy and enjoyment, if they are allowed to be out in pasture. As opposed to, say, veal!

Peterson developed very serious health problems, resulting in an extreme autoimmune response to food and ended up on pain killers and an induced coma. I would not take dietary advice from him.

Lol fork off, it highly depends on your schedule and type of work.

I have a very unusual eating schedule right now and have lost nearly all the fat I gained when I was working from home and eating early.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com