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No link between eating dinner after 8pm, obesity in children
- EGreg 10y agoObesity isn't the only thing though. Skipping dinner or breakfast is a form of intermittent fasting. I think intermittent fasting improves lifespan. It is a form of calorie restriction. People I know even do water diets to repair bones - but that may be a bit extreme. However, this is probably not good for children. Their bodies need to grow. What we really need is to feed them healthy food instead of the processed crap found now in many stores. The explosion of sugars and HFCS in everything probably contributes to the diabetes / weight problems for kids today.
- NoPiece 10y agoThere some evidence supporting time restricted eating (clustering your meals close together). https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/03/07/intermittent-fasting-diets-are-gaining-acceptance/?referer= https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/03/07/intermitten...
- dhimes 10y agoI tried this for 6 months with my doc. Didn't work for me at all. I actually came across the idea on the National Academy of Sciences web site.
- bosie 10y agoHow did it not work for you?
- dhimes 10y agoMy fasting blood sugar rose as well as my cholesterol levels.
- WillPostForFood 10y agoWhat were you trying to accomplish? If it was increased lifespan, then thankfully the subject of the experiment is still alive.
- dhimes 10y agoI was looking at my blood work: cholesterol and fasting blood sugar. I had the worst numbers of my life.
- reese_john 10y agoIIRC the only studies that show that calorie restriction improves lifespan are done in animals, so you can't really extend this to humans.
- EGreg 10y agoHumans are biologically so different from animals? Most such studies are done in animals first. Human trials take much longer. Here is a much more recent study with monkeys: http://news.wisc.edu/monkey-caloric-restriction-study-shows-big-benefit-contradicts-earlier-study/ http://news.wisc.edu/monkey-caloric-restriction-study-shows-...
- nocomments 10y agoso you can correlate success with trial animals to success with humans. eh ? i know its hackernews but i see a lot of people preaching about their favorite hacky fad food habits.How about asking people to live a normal healthy lifestyle. Few hours of exercise and normal food that your body can sustain.
- EGreg 10y agoWell unless you can tell me what makes humans so different from monkeys that you think it won't work.
- nocomments 10y agohow about starting with basic physical anatomy and then move on the other differences. Also for starters bigger brains, faster metabolism,etc.. unless you consider the above don't have an impact on our food eating and fat storing mechanism.
- dpark 10y agoLots of interventions that work in animal models do not work in humans. Physiology is different as is adherence. Humans control their own diets, so a really difficult diet will simply result in no humans sticking with it. Humans aren't even monkeys. So it's not surprising that "works in monkeys" is a mediocre proxy for "works in humans".
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- danneu 10y agoFinally, an article to link to my girlfriend when she finds me eating ice cream at 3am. It's a stretch, but I'm easily convinced after 8pm.
- nocomments 10y agomeh.. in asian countries its a norm to have late dinner and go to bed after that. Doesn't make the kids fat.
- igor_filippov 10y agoIs this an anecdotic evidence?
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- EpicEng 10y agoIt may not be the entire picture, but certainly we have obesity stats for millions of children in Asia.
- juancn 10y agoDuh! A large chunk of the world eats dinner after 9pm and obesity rates are lower or the same than other countries.
- SmellTheGlove 10y agoSeriously. Southern Europe is pretty thin - and Italy, Spain, Southern France all eat late.
- Oletros 10y agoNot in Northern Italy :) I would like to know why the downvotes, my wife is from Milan and her family from a town near Bergamo and everybody I know have dinner between 19:00 and 19:30
- SmellTheGlove 10y agoMy mom's side of the family is from Genova. They liked to eat a little later, but not absurdly late. I've spent a lot of time in Rome and Florence, not as much up north, and even in those places most restaurants don't open until 19:00 or 19:30, and the local traffic really picks up closer to 20:00. In any case, I'm not downvoting you, but I will point out that 19:30 is late for dinner by US standards. Around here most folks are having dinner immediately after work. My wife, for instance, will usually have dinner on the table at 5:30PM on the dot. Too early for me, but we have a 4 year old! (I digress)
- SmellTheGlove 10y agoSeriously. Southern Europe is pretty thin - and Italy, Spain, Southern France all eat late.
- erelde 10y agoSpain and the south of France comes to mind as examples.
- nocomments 10y ago
- mrcnkoba 10y agoThere obviously is a link between the span of eating and your weight. But it's not as big, when you eat large quantities of food. If we are talking about obesity it means that it took years to put someone in that state. Eating 300-500 of unhealthy kcal less, by decreasing the eating span just delays the problem. I do agree though, that the shorter eating span the better. It's called intermittent fasting and there are promising results coming out from research on that.
- blowski 10y agoPerhaps there's a spurious link - the kinds of families who eat after 9pm are also the kinds of families who eat too much. Maybe. I have zero evidence, not even a circumstantial anecdote. But perhaps that's where theories like this come from.
- AznHisoka 10y agoit may not lead to weight gain but is still healthy to eat late dinners? If you have chronic acid reflux (GERD), eating late makes it worse (acid comes back up when you lie down after a meal) Eating late can also lead to worse sleep as your body is spending energy digesting food rather than repairing itself. Personally I feel much more refreshed the next day, when dinner is around 6pm and when it is the lightest meal of the day. Practical issues aside, i cant think of any health benefits eating a late dinner.
- amelius 10y agoSome people are advocating to have the largest meal in the morning, then a medium meal in the afternoon, and a light meal in the evening. (I could not find a good reference, it's something I've encountered several times in blogs). Anyone here following such a regime, and does it work in controlling weight and feeling healthy?
- dxbydt 10y agoIt definitely works. Among the people I have looked at and modeled, supper timing is definitely correlated to weight gain. If you are interested I can link to some preliminary modeling I have done.
- dpark 10y agoSome people advocate intermittent fasting. Some people advocate skipping lunch. Some people advocate advocate nearly any strategy you can imagine. The only thing that really matters is whether you eat less. Any strategy that helps you eat less will result in weight loss/control.
- brandall10 10y ago"The only thing that really matters is whether you eat less." Intermittent fasting != calorie restriction - you can eat the same amount. The benefits are from entering a fat burning/low insulin state that occurs by going > 12 hours without food.
- matwood 10y ago> Intermittent fasting != calorie restriction - you can eat the same amount. But most people will not. To keep numbers simple lets say I eat 2kcals/day. Now I decide to intermittent fast and only eat every other day. On the days I do eat, I will have a really hard time pushing down 4k cals unless I plan to make them up (when I used to bulk eating became a chore). Also, since I'm already doing IF, I'm probably a bit health conscious and likely eat pretty health on the days I do eat making it even harder to make up the missed calories. Over the course of a week and month those cals missed on the IF days but not fully made up on the eat days do add up which leads to weight loss.
- dxbydt 10y agoThe article cites major caveats - 1. Cohort size of children eating after 8pm is much smaller than before - mostly because the kids are in bed by then ( they are looking at 4-10 year olds ) 2. Self reported Food Diaries are seldom accurate. 3. This study is the first of it's kind. Supper timing is majorly correlated to weight gain, especially if most of the calories are from carbs. Simple rules like NCA5 or NCA6 ( no carbs after 5pm ) easily influence weight loss in teens & adults. I wouldn't try this hack with 4-10 year olds, but once you are in the teens, it is a nice simple body hack.
- tormeh 10y agoWell, having a period of time each day where you eat nothing should mean less calories eaten because of boredom or similar regardless of when that is.
- dpark 10y ago>Supper timing is majorly correlated to weight gain Citation? This seems anecdotal and also very likely to be entangled with other variables.
- dxbydt 10y agoIt is anecdotal insofar as the anecdotes are from my limited cohort ( few dozen subredditors who have signed up with weightgreat.com ). Also, you are right about the multicollinearity issues ( supper time predictor entangled with other predictors). But the overall effect is pretty significant. There's some preliminary material here on the models used. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630203 2. http://weightgreat.com/forecast.html http://weightgreat.com/forecast.html
- dpark 10y agoSo self-reporting on the internet? Yeah, I'd call that anecdotal.
- conistonwater 10y ago
- lloydde 10y agoI was a small kid and my kids are small. I've always found late dining to be uncomfortable as I'm too hungry. Thankfully, it isn't cultural in the areas of Canada and USA where I've lived. Does anyone have any experience where adopting later dining improved happiness or health? What changes did you make? How did you adopt it?
- watwut 10y agoAssuming late dinning is sinning after 20:00, we adopted it in the summer. It definitely improved hapiness, because we did not had to watch the time and could leave playground when we felt like leaving it. (Our playground even had wifi for parental hapiness. Kids were happy to be with friends.) It is safe to assume the health got better too, because we had more sun and kids had more exercise. We adopted it by not feeling like leaving and taking food with us.
- lloydde 10y agoI like that. The kids want to snack after school anyway, so a later dinner as the weather gets nicer makes a lot of sense. The tricky part might be keeping bedtime reasonable as my kids are still young.
- hourislate 10y agoMy opinion is the amount of time spent eating (and not when you eat) is a major contributor to lower obesity rates. When you spend more time chewing and conversing, you seem to eat less and get fuller. Typically you can't even finish your meal. In NA we eat to quickly not giving our brain and stomach time to send the proper signals of fullness. Try it sometime, take a typically portion and spend 20 minutes not eating more than half of it. You probably won't be able to finish it.
- matwood 10y agoAnd they are all tricks to eat less.
- Reedx 10y agoObesity isn't about when you eat, it's about what you eat and how much.
- ouid 10y agoHow much you eat might have been related to when you eat. No one here is seriously advocating that energy is not conserved.
- giarc 10y agoThere was a paper published recently (within last year or two) that looked at the time between first meal and last meal of the day in mice. In general, they found that the shorter time between first and last meal had a significant correlation on weight loss. For example if the time between breakfast and dinner was 10 hours instead of 14 hours, the 10 hour mice weighed less than the 14 hour mice, even on the same diet. I can't find the citation right now but if I do I will edit the comment.
- ouid 10y agoI'm commenting to express interest in that citation, and will go looking for it myself if you don't find it. If I had to bullshit a mechanism, I would say that, for well fed mice, activity increases with the amount of time since the last meal, so mice on the early dinner diet would be more active in the mornings before breakfast. To test this, I would see if I could get the effect to go away by feeding mice as soon as they woke up, and then 10 or 14 hours later.
- giarc 10y agohttp://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2814%2900498-7 http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2814... I think this is it. It even includes a nice Graphical Abstract which is kind of comical.
- theparanoid 10y agoAnother way of saying intermittent fasting works.
- projektir 10y ago> For example if the time between breakfast and dinner was 10 hours instead of 14 hours, the 10 hour mice weighed less than the 14 hour mice, even on the same diet. Doesn't this contradict calories in - calories out?
- soufron 10y agoWho eats before 8pm ?!? O_o What kind of country are they talking about?
- cderwin 10y agoPresumably America? Almost everyone I know regularly eats dinner between 5:30 and 7:30.
- ashark 10y agoYoung kids need ~11-12 hrs of sleep a night. They have to get up at about 7:00AM (because WE have to get up then) so bedtime is fixed at 7ish. Bedtime routine takes 30-45 minutes. We don't want to have a separate dinner for the kids. Plus we need kid-free time to keep the house in something resembling order. So of course we have early (~5:30) dinner. How do families in 7:00-9:00 dinner start time countries handle this?
- Mc_Big_G 10y agoWhy is it so hard for us to accept that obesity is due to overeating? Also, the myth that exercise is the key to losing weight won't die.
- hourislate 10y agoBecause the cause of obesity is not that simple to diagnose. There are many factors that contribute to obesity. Over eating is just one. But I do agree with you that exercise has little to do with losing weight and can be counter productive when trying to lose weight.
- Coding_Cat 10y agoWell, overeating is maybe simplified too much but it can be reduced mostly to "wrong eating". Perhaps not overeating in absolute volume but overeating of effetcive calories. There might be metabolic difference between people leading to different eating patterns working for different people, sure. But if you are obese in virtually all cases it is simply a matter of changing your diet (even for the cases that have an independent medical cause such as a thyroid disease). And in most cases the fix is to simply eat less callories in general by eating less and/or healthier alternatives. And exercise does help you lose body fat, unless you start eating extra to compensate for the exercise as most people vastly overestimate how much calories you actually burn working out. And of course power-training that helps you build muscle mass can increase your weight but that does not mean that it is bad for you. If you're going to the gym regularlly anyway during your diet just measure your body-composition to track your effective weight. (not sure how accurate that is though).
- DanBC 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
- smhost 10y agoI have a friend who eats 3000~4000 kcals with no exercise and he is as thin as a stick. I have another friend who is a complete couch potato and eats junk food all day with no exercise, and he looks like a gym rat. I think a lot of the magical thinking surrounding weight loss is because there's no one-size-fits-all solution, so people make up patterns in their heads and believe them to be true.
- angry_octet 10y ago"The lead author of the study, Dr Gerda Pot, is a Visiting Lecturer in the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division and is also based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She said: ‘The findings of our study are surprising. We expected to find an association between eating later and being more likely to be overweight but actually found that this was not the case. This may be due to the limited number of children consuming their evening meal after 8pm in this cohort." So the study is far too small to have the power to come to surprising conclusions, and should probably be retracted. Also, Science Bulletin has very annoying popovers that will drive the audience away.
- jjawssd 10y agoWhen do you eat dinner? Vote Here https://goo.gl/9XHtG7 https://goo.gl/9XHtG7 Voting Results https://goo.gl/aIixqm https://goo.gl/aIixqm UPVOTE FOR VISIBILITY
- niels_olson 10y agoUnfortunately, some people are going to read this wrong. For example: I know some folks who have "second dinner" after 8 pm. Their children are definitively obese, and I can see them citing this study as a reason to keep eating "a meal called dinner" after 8 pm.
- jelliclesfarm 10y agoIt's probably a cultural thing. In India...We ate after 8 all the time. 6.00 is when you get the last installment of caffeine..as tea or coffee. But then again, we were not allowed to come back home until after sunset. Play outside till sunset, homework time afterward, dinner and then a little walk/tv time and then off to bed. Elsewhere...Asian outdoor markets thrive until midnight. In my suburban town in America, everything is dead by 8. It's a tad depressing actually.
- Mikeb85 10y agoI think it's weather related. In most countries that have late night outdoor markets, temperatures are unbearably hot during the day, and comfortably warm at night. In much of North America, half the year is only tolerably warm during the day.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoThey thrive past midnight. Especially in more southern locales in the summer, when it isn't even reasonable outside until after 8. Changsha, Guangzhou, Wuhan, etc....
- balladeer 10y agoAnother Indian here. I don't know if, ever, I have had dinner before 8 in my entire life here or maybe not even before 9pm. I mean I am sure I would have a couple of times but I just can't remember. Dinner for us meant the thing you do before you sleep.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI'm curious-everyone who is doing the contrarian "But I never eat before 8pm/whatever"-where do you live? Also its a bit of a straw man to make 5pm your early eating time-I usually eat between 6 and 7-is that abnormally early? I also tend to get to work earlier and leave earlier as well.
- Oletros 10y agoI live in Spain and we have dinner at 20:00, almost all my friends and family have dinner between 21:00 and 22:00. My Italian family have dinner at 19:00
- foxfired 10y agoI think the problem is not really about eating late, but more of eating a large meal and going to bed right away. I don't know about it making you gain weight, but I know I wake up tired and my heart rate tracker shows it being much higher then usual.
- iopq 10y agoStill not a problem. Whatever makes you eat the least will let you control your weight. For some people, it might be not eating before bed, for others it may not matter.
- sandworm101 10y agoWhen else are they going to eat? I was once a serios competative swimmer (think top 100 in the US). If i ate between school at say 4pm and training at 5, that dinner would have been floating down the lanes. After 8pm was the only option. (Same for breakfast. Eat after training, on way to school.) Properly active kids eat when they can. Nobody should skip exercise or other activity for the sake of some silly 1950s eating schedual.
- balladeer 10y agoSo the last time I had put on weight (an accident -> was bedridden for long) I decided to fix my food intake along with running and sports. One advice I received from a dietician was that have dinner at least 2 hours before you go to bed and I followed it. I don't know whether it was other things that worked too or only others worked but I felt a clear difference in my fitness, sleep pattern ("very" uninterrupted), digestion, and mood when I woke up the next morning. On a side note, when I was S Korea - dinner happened at 5pm and I could never get used to it :-)