Study finds everything you eat is associated with when you eat

Eating at night is associated with an increased intake of calories, and also lower quality food, according to a fresh study.

Maintaining a healthful diet is associated with how late in your day people consume most of their food, according to analyze presented at the European and International Conference on Obesity (ECOICO 2020).

The study discovered that people who consume the majority of their calories at night tend to consume more of these and have less quality diet.

The study’s aim was to explore the connection between your evening consumption of calories - the way of measuring energy intake (EI) - and diet quality. Judith Baird, a researcher from the Nutrition Innovation Centre for Food and Health at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, led the study.

Previous studies have discovered that hunger follows a daily rhythm and that this rhythm is, in a few ways, not what persons might expect. Although people typically stop eating during an extended period of sleep, they break that fast using what is often the smallest meal of the day.

Meanwhile, hunger is commonly strongest late in the day, peaking at about 8:00 p.m., after most people have completed nearly all their daily activities.

EI consumption naturally is commonly a reply to hunger, and other research has investigated the effect of meal timing on metabolism and other bodily processes. The brand new study, however, talks about its implications for the quantity and quality of food that persons consume.

From 2008, the U.K.’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) captured detailed information regarding food consumption, nutrient intake, and nutritional status for individuals over the age of 18 months. Every year, the survey collected responses from a representative sample of just one 1,000 people. Baird and her colleagues analyzed data from 1,177 adults who participated in the survey from 2012 through 2017.

Overall, the researchers discovered that the participants were, normally, consuming practically 40% (39.8%) of their daily EI after 6:00 p.m.

Looking at the data more closely, the researchers divided persons into quartiles in line with the proportion of their daily EI that they consumed after 6:00 p.m. The persons in the lowest quartile consumed significantly less than 31.4% of their EI in the evening, while those in the best quartile ate a lot more than 48.6% during evening hours.

The researchers detected two significant trends in the info. First, the study discovered that eating later affected the full total EI for the day.

People who consumed the majority of their daily EI earlier tended to consume fewer calories during the period of a day.

The findings also suggested that meal timing influences the nutritional quality of food. Baird and her colleagues assessed individuals’ diets as they had reported them in the food diaries that that they had supplied to the NDNS. To do this, they consulted the rankings listed in the Nutrient-Rich Food Index. The index rates foods according with their ratio of important nutrients to calorie value.

Individuals who consumed more of their calories through the evening tended to have substantially poorer quality diets.

“Our results advise that consuming a lower proportion of EI in the evening may be connected with a lesser daily energy intake, while consuming a larger proportion of energy intake at night may be connected with a lower diet quality score.

- The study authors

The analysis authors present their insights as just one single facet of a deeper understanding of the result of a person’s daily food rhythms and the total amount and quality of food that they consume. They conclude:

“Timing of energy intake could be a significant modifiable behavior to consider in future nutritional interventions. Further analysis is currently needed to examine whether the distribution of energy intake and/or the types of food consumed in the evening are connected with measures of body composition and cardiometabolic health.”