Wrong dinner time can actually affect your lifespan?!

After a busy day at get off work, many workers have a rare chance to relax, and even dinner may become "more delicious" because of it. When faced with high pressure from school or work, they may be busy until very late and often miss dinner time. They can only eat dinner after they are done, and dinner time becomes an irregular "random choice".

Recently, there have been some comments about dinner time on the Internet, such as "eating dinner too late can easily induce obesity" and "eating dinner too late can reduce metabolism", which makes friends who often work overtime and have irregular dinner times feel nervous...

Today we will study:

Does eating dinner too late really make you fat?

How harmful is it to eat dinner irregularly?

What else should we pay attention to about dinner?

01 The impact of dinner time on obesity

As early as 2017, the West China School of Public Health of Sichuan University and the Research Institute of the West China School of Public Health of Sichuan University published a scientific research paper titled "Relationship between daily eating time and frequency of meals and overweight and obesity among adults in Chengdu" in the Journal of Modern Preventive Medicine.

During the experiment, in order to simultaneously determine the impact of delayed meal times on obesity , the researchers strictly investigated variables such as the number of meals, calorie intake, type, and physical activity of the participants in order to study the relationship between obesity and meal times .

This study adopted a random sampling method , randomly selecting 1 to 2 communities or rural areas in each district and county of Chengdu. A total of 1,285 adults were selected from 21 survey points, and finally 1,017 valid data were obtained, including 135 women.

In the study, researchers found through cluster random sampling that eating after 8 pm is likely to increase the risk of overweight and obesity.

02 Eating dinner irregularly is very harmful

In addition to obesity, studies have shown that the group with irregular dinner meals had a 44% increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke mortality .

Among obese participants, there was also a positive association between irregular dinner times and stroke , cerebral hemorrhage, and cardiovascular disease mortality .

A study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM) in 2020, which selected 20 healthy volunteers (10 men and 10 women) with an average age of 26 years old, an average body mass index of 23.2, and a fixed sleep time of going to bed between 10 pm and 1 am .

In the study, two groups ate dinner at their regular 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. , respectively, and were given the same calorie diet.

The study found that compared with volunteers who had dinner at 6 pm, people who ate dinner at 10 pm generally had higher blood sugar levels and their body fat consumption for heat was relatively low .

In addition, the volunteers who ate dinner at 10 pm had a peak glucose level increase of about 18% and a decrease of about 10% in the amount of fat burned throughout the night.

The researchers explain that this effect may be more pronounced in people with obesity or diabetes because their metabolic function is already impaired.

These research data suggest that eating dinner too late may, to some extent, lead to nocturnal glucose intolerance and reduce fatty acid oxidation and mobilization capacity.

Especially for people who go to bed early, eating late dinner for a long time may increase the risk of diabetes and thus affect life expectancy.

03 Things to note about dinner

So what can we do in our daily lives to regulate our diet and eat healthily to make our bodies healthier?

1. Standardize eating time

First of all, it is recommended that friends try to eat regularly, have fixed meal times, and arrange the energy intake of the three meals reasonably, so as to stabilize blood sugar, thereby reducing the burden on the body and the risk of disease.

Breakfast: Yu Kang, director of the Clinical Nutrition Department of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, said: Breakfast is best arranged between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning, because appetite is stronger at this time, which is more in line with the biological laws of the gastrointestinal tract. If you can't eat breakfast before 8:00, it should not be later than 9:00 at the latest.
Lunch: It is recommended to eat lunch between 11:30 and 13:30, and around 12:00 is more suitable.
Dinner: From the perspective of endocrine and digestion, dinner time should not exceed 8:00 pm.
If you are relatively tight on time due to your own specific reasons, it is recommended that you avoid eating dinner during bedtime as much as possible.

2. Pay attention to the standard interval time

In terms of time interval, 4 to 6 hours is generally appropriate.

People with diabetes should pay special attention.

Secondly, researchers from the University of Paris in France found that:

Compared with participants who ate four or fewer times a day, those who ate five or more times a day had an 8% and 20% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, respectively.

3. Reasonably control the amount of food intake

In terms of food intake, the energy provided by breakfast should account for 25% to 30% of the body's total energy for the day, lunch should account for 30% to 40%, and dinner should account for 30% to 45%.