Eat on the clock- avoid weight gain

Good news – scientists reckon they know how we can avoid putting on weight. The answer is simple: we should eat on a schedule and avoid simply eating whenever we want to.

A new study in mice, conducted by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, U.S., found that mice which ate whenever they wanted to put on weight. In contrast, mice that ate the same amount of calories BUT were restricted to eating for just eight hours a day avoided the weight increase.

The findings suggest that eating to schedule and restricting meal times could be an underappreciated way to help stave off obesity.

Researcher and associate professor Satchidananda Panda believes eating at set mealtimes helps to keep us trim because of our bodies’ natural rhythms. “Every organ has a clock,” he says. He says that our livers, muscles, intestines and other organs that relate to digestion and fat production work at peak efficiency at certain times, whereas they are all but asleep at others.

We need processes such as cholesterol breakdown to be working and fully functional when we eat as opposed to when we don’t. When we eat frequently throughout the day or night or snack at unusual times, this throws off our normal metabolic cycles, says Panda, meaning that our system isn’t fully functioning and doing its job at the right time. As such, the excess calories we eat may be turned to fat and stored, when they wouldn’t otherwise be at a different time.

The 18 week long study’s results showed that the mice who were restricted to when they ate gained 28 per cent less weight than their non-restricted counterparts; they also suffered less liver damage and showed improvements in their metabolism.
Further research is needed to ascertain if this is also true of humans, not forgetting to track what they eat as well as when they eat, says Panda.

He stressed that the eating patterns of humans have no doubt changed over the years and this should be studied.
It seems that access to late-night TV or staying awake later and therefore snacking later – plus greater access to food – has changed the way we eat and could even go some way to explaining our obesity epidemic.