Regular eating times and fasting for a number of hours a day might prove to be beneficial to our health, a US study has claimed.
The advice comes after scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in San Diego, California, discovered that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period could override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice.
In tests, mice that were limited to eating during an eight-hour period were healthier than mice that were allowed to eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet.
It means that the health consequences of a poor diet may partly be as a result of a mismatch between our body clocks and our eating schedules.
Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory and senior author of the paper, said the study looked to establish if obesity and metabolic diseases resulted from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles.
“Our findings, however, suggest that regular eating times and fasting for a significant number of hours a day might be beneficial to our health,” he said.
The research, which is published in the May 17 edition of Cell Metabolism, involved feeding two sets of mice, which shared the same genes, gender and age, a diet comprising 60 per cent of its calories from fat.
One group of mice was allowed to eat at any time and these primarily nocturnal creatures ate half their food at night nibbled throughout the day.
The other group was restricted to eating for only eight hours every night, thereby fasting for about 16 hours a day. Two control groups ate a standard diet comprising about 13 per cent of calories from fat under similar conditions.
After 100 days, it was discovered that the mice that were allowed to eat freely gained weight and developed high cholesterol, high blood glucose, liver damage and diminished motor control, while the mice in the time-restricted feeding group weighed 28 per cent less and showed no adverse health effects despite consuming the same amount of calories from the same fatty food.
The time-restricted mice also outperformed the other group and those on a normal diet when given an exercise test.
Researcher Megumi Hatori described the results as surprising.
“For the last 50 years, we have been told to reduce our calories from fat and to eat smaller meals and snacks throughout the day,” she said. “We found, however, that fasting time is important. By eating in a time-restricted fashion, you can still resist the damaging effects of a high-fat diet, and we did not find any adverse effects of time-restricted eating when eating healthy food.”
However, she said that people must not believe that eating lots of unhealthy food is all right as long as there is fasting.
“What we showed is under daily fasting the body can fight unhealthy food to a significant extent, but there are bound to be limits,” she added.
Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet. Hatori M et al. Cell Metabolism May 17 2012
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