Can Changes in Breakfast and Dinner Timing Cut Body Fat?

Moneylife Digital Team 31 August 2018

According to a new pilot study by researchers in University of Surrey, published in the Journal of Nutritional Sciences, changes in breakfast and dinner time can reduce body fat.

During a 10-week study on ‘time-restricted feeding’ (a technical term used by academics to mean intermittent fasting), participants were split into two groups. One group was required to delay their breakfast by 90 minutes and have their dinner 90 minutes earlier. The other group (control group) had their meals at normal time. The participants provided blood samples and complete diet diaries before and during the 10-week intervention.

The participants could eat freely, provided it was within a certain eating time window. This helped researchers assess whether this type of diet was easy to follow in everyday life.

The researchers, led by Dr Jonathan Johnston, found that those who changed their mealtimes lost, on average, more than twice as much body fat as those in the control group who ate their meals at normal time. Although the participants were free to eat anything they could, researchers found that those who changed their mealtimes ate less food overall than the control group.

The researchers found that 57% of participants ate less, either due to lower appetite or decreased eating opportunities or a cutback in snacking (especially in the evenings). Would they continue with changed timings despite obvious benefits? Unfortunately, when questioned, 57% of participants felt they could not have maintained the changed timings beyond the 10-week study period because it would be incompatible with family and social life.

It is worth remembering that some form of time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting has been a part of Indian family and religious life for eons. Western science has started discovering the benefits of this very recently.

Dr Jonathan Johnston, reader in chrono-biology and integrative physiology at the University of Surrey, said: “We are now going to use these preliminary findings to design larger, more comprehensive studies of time-restricted feeding.”