Eating late might make you obese, confirms new study. Good news? Eat early and keep fat at bay

If you are one of those who believes in late dinners and midnight snacking, then know that you alone are the cause of many illnesses and conditions. Now these are completely avoidable if you shift the heavier food during the earlier part of the day, preferably in the first half.
A new study investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, has found that eating late at night may increase one’s likelihood of developing obesity as it increases hunger, burns less calories and changes fat tissue.
The results of the study revealed that eating later had a “profound effect on hunger” and appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin, which influence our drive to eat. “Specifically, levels of the hormone leptin, which signals satiety, decreased across the 24 hours in the late eating condition compared to the early eating conditions,” said the study.
The study was conducted Frank A. J. L. Scheer, PhD, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Programme in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, and Nina Vujovic, PhD, a researcher in the Medical Chronobiology Programme in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders.
HOW MEAL TIMINGS AFFECT BODY FAT
Decoding the findings, Priyanka Rohatgi, Chief Clinical Dietitian at Apollo Hospital, says that the timing of eating significantly impacts the energy expenditure, appetite and molecular pathways in adipose tissue. “Snacking at night is frequently done while streaming, watching television or even reading. Your attention is probably on the television show or book you’re reading rather than the number of calories you’re taking in. Obesity and metabolic syndrome are risk factors for late eating. It could be time to break the habit if you frequently visit the kitchen in the hours before night,” she adds.
She further says that eating high fat, salt and sugar foods (HFSS) at irrational timings impacts gut health which leads to inflammation.
Even a midnight snack, says Dr Amrita Ghosh, consultant doctor at Fortis CDOC Hospital, can decrease the satiety hormone. “This will make us relatively hungrier the next day compelling us to increase calorie intake. On the other hand, the body’s calorie burning power is reduced. This process will lead to fat accumulation and weight gain which will further cascade into metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes. This happens even if you eat less during the day,” says she.
HOW LATE MEALS IMPACT OUR CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS
According to Dipti Khatuja, head nutrition at Fortis Memorial Research Institute Gurgaon, “Late-night eating causes the clock discipline desynchrony during which the gut clock doesn’t match the normal body clock. This leads to an increase in the rise of insulin resance, weight gain, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and multiple metabolic diseases. It has been shown that once this circadian rhythm is durbed, it also leads to gut dysbiosis. Night cleaning substances digest and flush out the debris, mucus and old gut cells. But when this cycle or the rhythm is durbed, these do not work efficiently.” Gut dysbiosis affects the counts of good bacteria and imbalances them vis-à-vis harmful bacteria. This in turn impacts our metabolism, digestion and accelerates conditions for metabolic diseases, Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
HOW TO FIX MEAL TIMINGS
Dr Ghosh advises the age-old “breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have dinner like a poor man” mantra which implies the quantity not quality of food at different times of day. “For ages we have been told to eat less for dinner, now the reason for the same is shown in this study,” she adds.
According to Khatuja, light and meal timings are the most powerful external influences that affect the body clock and this needs to be synchronised with the master clock. This needs to be done so that we do not disrupt the cardiac circadian rhythm. Besides, our cellular repair happens only six hours after our last food intake and it picks up over another six hours. In total, 12 hours are needed for full body cleaning after our last meal. So we are shortening the time window to heal ourselves. Cued to a circadian rhythm, our pancreas makes a lot of insulin in the morning and early afternoon but slows down mid-afternoon. night, the insulin in our bloodstream drops further, so glucose stays longer in our arteries.
“As a clinical nutrition, I would suggest everybody to have meals early, keep them light and include a lot of fibre in the diet. This should be teamed up with half-an hour to 45 minutes of physical activity because meal timings can have a direct impact on your body metabolism and thus protect you from various degenerative diseases,” she adds.
PAST RESEARCH PROVED YET AGAIN
The research only corroborates many past studies. In 2012, Salk Institute researcher Satchin Panda published a ground-breaking study in which he fed a high-fat diet to genetically identical mice. Half of the mice ate all their food in eight hours while the other half ate ad libitum, anytime they wanted. After three months, the mice who ate at any time they wanted were stricken with obesity, diabetes, liver disease, and a host of other ugly conditions. But the controlled group stayed healthy, with normal weight, blood sugar and cholesterol. Their livers were less fatty than those of the free-eating mice, their motor coordination was better, and their entire bodies were less inflamed.
Other researchers followed up on Panda’s work and even tested them on humans. In multiple trials, volunteers who ate in narrower time windows, lost weight and lowered their blood pressure.
In an Israeli study in 2012, obese volunteers signed up for weight-loss regimens, both totalling 1,400 calories a day. One group ate 700 calories at breakfast, 500 at lunch, and 200 at dinner, while the other group ate the reverse: 200 at breakfast, 500 at lunch, 700 at dinner. After three months, the first group lost more weight, had better blood pressure and cholesterol counts and were far more sensitive to insulin than the other group.