It’s not just what you eat, but the time of day you eat it

Readily available caloric intake, in terms of human evolution, is relatively new. I imagine our ancestors waking up in the morning and going out on a hunt or foraging for something to eat.

Personally, I've been doing intermittent fasting (16/8) for roughly seven years. I (typically) eat between 12 - 8pm and sleep between midnight-ish and 8 am. I eat a half cup of oatmeal at noon, a protein shake and some kind of fruit at roughly 3-4pm, and (usually) do some weight training roughly an hour later, followed by another protein shake after and a more broadly nutritious dinner (vegetable heavy, often with a lean protein and little to no carbohydrates) somewhere between 7-8pm. On days with this schedule my first activity after waking is spirited running/leaping up and down a flight of stairs for a total of 10 round trips. Speaking of which...

When I do cardio it's in the morning fasted. I don't have any science to back it up but for me, personally, something happens doing cardio fasted. It's "hard" but the response from my body and mind is amazing. I can't help but think my pre-agriculture caveman brain feeds off of some kind of reward in eating after running a 5k. I (typically) do this once or twice a week and the mental clarity and general "feeling" of health afterwards is amazing. At this point a more typical (at least for Americans) diet of eating a heavy breakfast, snacking on whatever throughout the day, and eating shortly before bed seems like it would ruin me.

Or that having the bigger meals earlier in the day is most important.

Or that splitting up your eating into more, smaller meals is better, the opposite of intermittent fasting.

In the end, I think the exact skew comes down to individual digestive systems and the only macro advice is "eat a bit less / eat nutritionally wholesome stuff / move a bit more / more sleep is better than less"

Weight gain and bad sleep followed. Nowadays I make a game-like goal of "be hungry at lunch time". To do that I need to stop getting calories at ~6PM. I'll have just black coffee and water when waking up and lunch at 11AM.

I sleep much better, dental health and blood pressure have improved, weight is slowly going down. In addition I crave for stuff like broccoli, mushrooms and protein at the early lunch time - unlike the fries and pizza I desired before when eating a super late lunch at 4PM or so.

Later learned my current strategy is called intermittent fasting. Works great for me.

Beneficial in what way?

A couple of quotes from the article you linked: "In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis"

"Increased fat oxidation, despite higher postprandial insulin concentrations with breakfast skipping, suggests the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may increase metabolic risk over time."

"Altogether, the present results support the association between breakfast skipping and disturbed glucose homeostasis, which is not explained by a positive energy balance."

This isn't exactly my domain of expertise, but it does not sound all that beneficial to me. Of course, something can be beneficial in one way and problematic in another. Further, I would caution against selectively reading a single article.

Eat when you're hungry and be wary of restrictions.

Being overweight and diabetes are comorbidities of nearly everything, and are comorbidities of each-other for that matter. People are more overweight than ever. If anything there is not nearly enough alarm, and far too much normalization of the increasing status quo.

> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier.

Approximately 1.5% of US adults are underweight. Approximately 73.6% are overweight or obese.

Comparatively, less than 2% of the U.S. population is underweight. And even for these people, simply gaining weight by tricking your biological clock would not be a good advice either.

Therefore there is no "one size fits all" solution outside of the general "eat a bit less, move a bit more" guidance.

It's kind of like when they interview 100+ year olds for "the tricks to a long life" and it's just inane random stuff.

Maybe in places of famine, but the target audience is western, specifically American. Emaciation is hardly a problem in the US. Obesity is. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Sure, it may not be enough to simply aim at weight reduction (most probably have bad diets to begin with), but weight loss is definitely important and healthy.

Reference needed.

Being overweight most definitely is a health risk.

What kind of risk exactly is then probably related to personal biology of each individual but I guess the list to pick from is quite long - diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, joint problems etc.

Ofc weight is not the only relevant metric but it is relevant still.

This is obviously technically true, but it's like reading "domestic violence" and thinking "ah, this must be about women beating their husbands". Yes, both directions of the problem actually exist, but one is orders of magnitude more likely.

I'm sure given 7-8 billion people in the world this might be "true" for some value of "lots", but I'm curious where data backs this assertion for the audience for which this article is intended; where food is overabundant and mostly overprocessed.

It does: "Because of the way our internal clocks operate, our bodies are primed to digest and metabolize food early in the day. As the day progresses, our metabolisms become less efficient."

>> No. A few people. Very few. Lots need to lose weight to be healthier.

I feel like it's a personal preference and I only eat later in a day, but here[1] you may find some explanations on why eating in the morning may be better.

[1] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-intermittent-fasting-...

"I encourage my competitors to take some really bad advice" simply becomes tiresome when the rest of the traffic has been pushed away and that's all that remains in the social media sphere.

I’ve found when I eat big breakfasts, I eat things like eggs that keep me full for hours, so I just eat less later

This is typically how it's done though: if you were to make a subselection of the treatment group to only include those that adhered to the intervention then (a) you risk undoing the randomization, because people who are more likely to adhere to the protocol are likely different in other ways as well and (b) the effect size you'd report would be a best case scenario, not realistically the kinds of results a dietician would see when helping people.

It's explained in the paragraph right before the one you quoted.

>A look at their hormone levels showed why: Eating later caused their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, to spike, while simultaneously suppressing their levels of leptin, a hormone that causes satiety.

Why? It's no mystery.

From a very young age American children are trained to associate daily activities with food. Americans have a food for everything and that food is present, in abundance, wherever profit is to be had.

(Seriously, list an activity and I'll reply with at least one food pairing.)

Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else.

This requires willpower of which no person has an unlimited reserve.

The basis for obesity is undeniably food addiction. How can we expect addicts to fight uphill against a system and a culture which has evolved to profit from their failure?

I wonder if people who are paying attention to what they eat are equally as conscious about what they drink.

Indication of a diet too high in carbs, leading to insulin levels being too high, leading to a crash in blood glucose, leading to feelings of cold and starvation. Which some people can, temporarily, white-knuckle self discipline thru, but most cannot.

My personal IF is based on not feeling hungry. Sure, I'm self disciplined and hit the gym and all that, but I don't need any discipline for my diet.

Self discipline is only useful for weight loss when food shopping, not when cooking or eating. I can't binge the entire pack of oreos if I don't buy a pack of oreos. And I don't feel hunger or hypoglycemic because I minimize my carb intake, which minimizes my craving for carbs.

If so many companies were not making so much money selling hyperrefined carb junk food, that stuff would probably be regulated as an addictive drug. Abuse of those products certainly kills people at a young age.

There's a tremendous history of nutrition science being published with intentional bias. Only in 2005 when you must now declare any conflicts of interest have we suddenly had huge quiet zones. Evil things in our diets in 2004 suddenly not anymore.

That doesn’t seem to contradict the article. They both acknowledge that what and when you eat are important.