18 ms·

It’s not just what you eat, but the time of day you eat it

123 points by SirLJ 4y ago

Rich_Morin 4y ago
The article consistently talks about "time of day" (e.g., morning), but it could be that "time since arising" is more relevant.
gberger 4y ago
This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better. The only explanation it gives is related to weight-loss. Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large. Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. And if eating late at night helps with that goal, then eating later can be considered healthy.
- qsort 4y ago
  > Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight This is obviously technically true, but it's like reading "domestic violence" and thinking "ah, this must be about women beating their husbands". Yes, both directions of the problem actually exist, but one is orders of magnitude more likely.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    Incorrect (by orders of magnitude). Both directions have about equal rates of occurrence. Female-initiated domestic violence is somewhat more frequent than male-initiated domestic violence. https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/ https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts...
    - qsort 4y ago
      Look, I don't want to get into a fight over that because it's completely out of topic, but to claim that "25.3% of individuals have perpetrated [violence]" and "80% (sic) of individuals have perpetrated emotional abuse" means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English.
      - viridian 4y ago
        Perhaps you live in a bubble (high income, high education) if you find it completely unbelievable that a quarter of the populace will engage in domestic violence at some point in their lives. I grew up in rural Appalachia, and I can tell you that the most common response to someone, say, being called a stupid bitch, is not to channel the eternal words of Marcus Aurelius or to center ones self like the Buddha, as might be the case for your average HN poster.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Men are continually trying to paint sexism as symmetric. Doesn't matter that 99% of the corpses that result from domestic violence are women, that 1% means that it's actually a back and forth tennis match. Meanwhile, one of the most common types of mass killings is when men just decide to kill every woman they see.
        TheHappyOddish 4y ago
        You seem to be conflating violence and murder. Yes, mens result in death more often, but data shows women and men are both comitters of domestic violence.
        annyeonghada 4y ago
        >Men are continually trying to paint sexism as symmetric Exactly, considering that in almost every societal metric that matters men do worse than women sexism against men is much worse, nothing symmetric.
        mrtweetyhack 4y ago
        [dead]
      - annyeonghada 4y ago
        >means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English Incredible how the same critic is never moved against women when engage in the same kind of Newspeak. Let's remember that "speech as violence" was not invented by men.
  - mrtweetyhack 4y ago
    [dead]
- mrpopo 4y ago
  Given the Washington Post is based in the US and has a majoritarily U.S.-based readership, and that almost 3 out of 4 adults in the U.S. are overweight, the general advice to lose weight is sound... Comparatively, less than 2% of the U.S. population is underweight. And even for these people, simply gaining weight by tricking your biological clock would not be a good advice either.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  The older I get the more I am pretty convinced that at the margin, every bodys digestive system and metabolism responds a little differently the time/frequency of meals, precise content of meals, amount of exercise, amount of sleep, etc. Therefore there is no "one size fits all" solution outside of the general "eat a bit less, move a bit more" guidance. It's kind of like when they interview 100+ year olds for "the tricks to a long life" and it's just inane random stuff.
  - notyourday 4y ago
    One does not become 100lb overweight because of "margins". One becomes 100lb overweight because they are doing 100mph in a 35mph zone so "slow the hell down" is a great advice.
    - imustbeevil 4y ago
      You also don't become 100lb overweight because you eat your first meal at 12pm instead of 8am. That's what that comment was saying; the only obvious advice is eat less and exercise more, and it works 100% of the time for all bodies.
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        Yes, thank you, lol.
      - kosievdmerwe 4y ago
        And of the two eating less is more important. The human body is remarkably efficient when it comes to exercise. Also important is eating your food in a manner (e.g., smaller portions more frequently) that you don't ever get really hungry. Extreme hunger leads to binge eating which can easily undo any calory deficit you managed that day.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Of course you do. That's like saying that you don't end up $100 in debt by having a deficit of $1 a day.
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  In the US, most people are overweight, not underweight. I'm not a medical student, but I can imagine that if the average American lost 10% of their excess body weight, the improvement to their health (and subsequently public health) would be enormous. But public officials don't address this like they did when I was growing up. Now we just have this weird culture of "fat acceptance", I guess to presumably spare peoples' feelings.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    >Now we just have this weird culture of "fat acceptance", I guess to presumably spare peoples' feelings. The USA obesity epidemic has been undergoing for decades. I highly doubt "anti-fatphobia" tiktoks are to blame here.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    You’re not a medical student, so you wouldn’t know, but it’s well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter. So sparing their feelings about their fatness is actually the correct behavior if we want to encourage the average American to lose weight. A fat person isn’t ignorant about their fatness, but not treating them any different for being fat is actually the path to get them thin.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      >It's well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter. Thanks for the downvote. That doesn't mean that doctors shouldn't tell their patients to lose some freaking weight if they're obese. Fat sympathy is a cultural problem. But also all the seed oils, sugars, and fakeness in our foods is another problem.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        I didn’t downvote you. Im just telling you that displays of fat shaming actually make fat people fatter, statistically, while there’s no evidence that fat sympathy does the same (and in fact might do the opposite).
- kome 4y ago
  "This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better." It does: "Because of the way our internal clocks operate, our bodies are primed to digest and metabolize food early in the day. As the day progresses, our metabolisms become less efficient."
  - jeltz 4y ago
    Which should mean the opposite, that eating later in the day is better for weightloss.
    - kome 4y ago
      why? that's not how metabolism works
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mmh0000 4y ago
        They’re confused by the word efficiency. They’re assuming that if metabolism is inefficient then it must take more energy to process food. Thus, more calories burned, thus weightloss.
    - thomascgalvin 4y ago
      Digest and metabolize. This would mean that early in the day, you digest food and put it to work. Your body temperature is higher, you fidget more, your body repairs some of the damage you did when you worked out last night. Later in the day, the food you digest sits around. Your body temperature is lower, you fidget less, your body performs less maintenance and repair. But the body isn't wasteful; it's still built to survive periodic famine. So, those extra calories that are just sitting around get stored away for later.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    It also mentions ghrelin and leptin
- simonsarris 4y ago
  > Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large. Being overweight and diabetes are comorbidities of nearly everything, and are comorbidities of each-other for that matter. People are more overweight than ever. If anything there is not nearly enough alarm, and far too much normalization of the increasing status quo. > Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. Approximately 1.5% of US adults are underweight. Approximately 73.6% are overweight or obese.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    There's so much to unpack beyond these surface-level statistics, though. Like how there's some evidence that the health risks associated with increased BMI are partially an artifact of weight loss diets being really bad for your health, plus selection bias. People with lower BMIs are significantly less likely to attempt these health-destroying weight loss diets in the first place. Which would then imply that an approach to the issue that focuses primarily on how to get people who are already fat to lose weight, rather than as a prevention-focused public health initiative, may be doing more harm than good. Or how lumping the overweight and obese groups together is a great example of lying with statistics by gerrymandering the BMI quantiles that seem to be healthiest together with those that have the poorest health outcomes, and away from a group that was arbitrarily defined the better part of two centuries ago based on one person's aesthetic standards rather than any health indicators, most of which weren't even known at the time. In other words, it's the crux of a pervasive piece of statistical circular reasoning. And the moralizing statements like "normalization of the increasing status quo" that politicize the issue, thereby making it harder to have a nuanced, thoughtful discussion about the topic, and instead push it toward always being yet another pea shooting contest between the "personal responsibility" and "fat positivitiy" caucuses. Which only serves to drown out any attempt to really contend with the full magnitude of the nuances and unknowns that surround this issue.
    - jagraff 4y ago
      This is nonsense. Obesity doesn’t cause health issues because of crash diets - the link between obesity and several bad health outcomes (insulin resistance/diabetes, hypertension, joint damage, to name a few) is extremely well established, and has nothing to do with diet and everything to do with the accumulation of superhuman levels of fat relative to the conditions in which humans evolved. You’re right that there is some controversy about where exactly the line for “overweight” should be, but there’s no question that when you get into the obese category (41% of Americans) it is extremely bad for your health, irrespective of what diet you’re on - humans simply aren’t designed to handle the amount of fat we now routinely accumulate.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. I'm sure given 7-8 billion people in the world this might be "true" for some value of "lots", but I'm curious where data backs this assertion for the audience for which this article is intended; where food is overabundant and mostly overprocessed.
- fsloth 4y ago
  “Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy“ Reference needed. Being overweight most definitely is a health risk. What kind of risk exactly is then probably related to personal biology of each individual but I guess the list to pick from is quite long - diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, joint problems etc. Ofc weight is not the only relevant metric but it is relevant still.
  - throw_pm23 4y ago
    I understood the post differently. For example, I am not overweight, never have been. I am interested in reading about healthy eating. I'm not interested in losing weight, as that would be unhealthy for me. Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight. Thus the two issues (health and weight loss) are conflated.
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      Look up the book perfect health diet
    - fsloth 4y ago
      Generally people conflate health and weight because globally, for a very large number of people, this is the main problem. As societies move to western diets, the average person becomes overweight and is diagnosed with one or more health problems directly related to obesity (pick one or more from my list above). This is the easy problem to diagnose. The connection between nutrition and health, if obesity is not your concern, seems indeed to be far more nuanced and complex. I'm not sure if anyone has come up with anything better that every expert could agree on except "eat little bit of everything". I suppose fasting seems to improve biological markers even for non-obese people so it's not only about weight loss as such, though.
    - thomascgalvin 4y ago
      > I am interested in reading about healthy eating.... Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight. I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that industrial food owns the food science in this country, and in most of the developed world. For decades, we were fed (no pun intended) a Food Pyramid that is a blatant lie, because it correlated to how monied interests wanted to feed the nation. I had my annual physical last week, and my doctor told me that the consensus is now "eat whole, natural, unprocessed foods as much as possible, and probably cut back on meat." That seems reasonable, on its face. It also seems prohibitively expensive for many people. I'm afraid that there isn't a great solution to this problem in this country, almost by design.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  > Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. Maybe in places of famine, but the target audience is western, specifically American. Emaciation is hardly a problem in the US. Obesity is. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Sure, it may not be enough to simply aim at weight reduction (most probably have bad diets to begin with), but weight loss is definitely important and healthy.
  - stinkytaco 4y ago
    The great irony is that while emaciation is hardly a problem, malnutrition is. It's a country that is both malnourished and obese and there just doesn't seem to be much of a public policy push to change that.
    - thomascgalvin 4y ago
      I would suspect that malnourishment leads to obesity, at least in part. When you stuff yourself with empty calories, your body is left unsatisfied, because it's missing important nutrients. This leads to hunger signals, which leads to eating more empty calories, which leads to ...
- VLM 4y ago
  This is the main problem with social media in its declining era. "I encourage my competitors to take some really bad advice" simply becomes tiresome when the rest of the traffic has been pushed away and that's all that remains in the social media sphere.
- icare_1er 4y ago
  " Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier" >> No. A few people. Very few. Lots need to lose weight to be healthier.
  - master-lincoln 4y ago
    According to a BBC article from 2016 [0] there were an estimated 641 million overweight people on earth and 462 million underweight people. I wouldn't call that "very few". [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-35933691 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-35933691
    - readthenotes1 4y ago
      I bet most of those half a billion underweight people are not going to be reading the Washington Post, or even worrying about dietary advice it's from a us-based news outlet. I thoroughly approve of the quibble though.
- hericium 4y ago
  > This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better. I feel like it's a personal preference and I only eat later in a day, but here[1] you may find some explanations on why eating in the morning may be better. [1] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-intermittent-fasting-boost-health-restrict.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-intermittent-fasting-...
civilized 4y ago
Interesting direction, but didn't see any quantification of the impact (of eating earlier in the day) on long-term health indicators. Hopefully we will see that later if this has any substance.
panchicore3 4y ago
There is a tab-or-space discussion around whether skipping breakfast is okay or not. Personally I feel way better when I plan to skip it for a few weeks, I feel the spark of feeling activated and feel less hungry during the day. I won't skip it on weekends I feel like I deserve that glorious breakfast though.
- euroderf 4y ago
  I preferred to skip breakfast, but filter coffee on an empty stomach would leave me with two days of brutal heartburn. Switching long-term to espresso made my tummy much happier and let me skip (or delay) breakfasts once again. YMMV.
  - VLM 4y ago
    > filter coffee on an empty stomach Freshly brewed higher quality looseleaf tea (no cheap supermarket tea bags) with nothing added is much less acidic than filter coffee.
jeltz 4y ago
If our metabolisms become less efficient the later in the day shouldn't that mean you want to eat late if the goal is to lose weight?
- bell-cot 4y ago
  It's looks poorly worded. I thing they're trying to say that late-day metabolism is less efficient at signalling the brain "plenty of food down here in the stomach, so flip the Hunger Bit to 0 now".
ldoughty 4y ago
Firstly: the two mentions of sample sizes are 485 and 16. The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time") Next; there's no details on why. > "the study found that eating later caused the participants to burn less fat and fewer calories, and pushed their fat cells to store more fat." This makes little sense.. unless the users activity level changes, the only other calorie burning I'm aware of is your base metabolic rate.. so eating later is possibly slowing down your metabolic rate?
- ldoughty 4y ago
  On a related topic: wouldn't the "time in body" be a larger factor on weight loss? Most nutrients are extracted I'm the intestines, so meals earlier in the day, followed by afternoon coffee and afternoon/evening vigorous exercise should mean you extract get calories from your food as these activities encourage your body to push through food without digesting them as fully...
- stdbrouw 4y ago
  > The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time") This is typically how it's done though: if you were to make a subselection of the treatment group to only include those that adhered to the intervention then (a) you risk undoing the randomization, because people who are more likely to adhere to the protocol are likely different in other ways as well and (b) the effect size you'd report would be a best case scenario, not realistically the kinds of results a dietician would see when helping people.
- darkstar999 4y ago
  > there's no details on why. It's explained in the paragraph right before the one you quoted. >A look at their hormone levels showed why: Eating later caused their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, to spike, while simultaneously suppressing their levels of leptin, a hormone that causes satiety.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
Different strokes for different folks. Although the article advocates for eating breakfast, I found what works best for me was skipping breakfast, skipping lunch, and eating a single meal a day, also known as OMAD (one meal a day). For me, this intermittent fasting routine started back in July 2022, when I initially starting experimenting. Net result: lost 20 pounds and 5 months later, glad to report not only has the weight stayed off but my (fasted) glucose levels dropped to below prediabetic levels (i.e. 99 mg/dL)
- verdenti 4y ago
  Exactly, I’ve done OMAD continuously for two years now and it has worked well for me. The only thing you should be looking at is it’s hard to get all your vitamins and minerals from one meal a day so make sure you take a multivitamin.
Aromasin 4y ago
Another preachy diet article? Oh joy. I read a journal article saying the opposite to this one, just 2 weeks ago; how it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when (protein and fats in the morning, carbs in the evening - which funny enough the article above actually denounces). It results in better sleep and as such, improved health and longevity. Eat what you want, when you want, and provided it's not too much or too processed then you'll likely be validating one study or another. I wish click-bait diet article fluff would crawl back into the tabloid, gas stations magazines they crawled from.
- tylervigen 4y ago
  > it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when That doesn’t seem to contradict the article. They both acknowledge that what and when you eat are important.
  - Aromasin 4y ago
    To quote the article directly: >Morning carbs are better than late-day carbs. That's in direct conflict with an article I read just two weeks ago, when carbs in the evening where best. Diet articles are always contradictions, regardless of source it seems..
rybosworld 4y ago
Skipping a meal/shrinking your eating window can have enormous benefits. There was discussion on this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309170 Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28490511/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28490511/
- vnorilo 4y ago
  I used to "forget" breakfast and lunch and didn't really feel that hungry, then have a big meal and keep snacking until bedtime. Weight gain and bad sleep followed. Nowadays I make a game-like goal of "be hungry at lunch time". To do that I need to stop getting calories at ~6PM. I'll have just black coffee and water when waking up and lunch at 11AM. I sleep much better, dental health and blood pressure have improved, weight is slowly going down. In addition I crave for stuff like broccoli, mushrooms and protein at the early lunch time - unlike the fries and pizza I desired before when eating a super late lunch at 4PM or so. Later learned my current strategy is called intermittent fasting. Works great for me.
- kmmlng 4y ago
  > Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner Beneficial in what way? A couple of quotes from the article you linked: "In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis" "Increased fat oxidation, despite higher postprandial insulin concentrations with breakfast skipping, suggests the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may increase metabolic risk over time." "Altogether, the present results support the association between breakfast skipping and disturbed glucose homeostasis, which is not explained by a positive energy balance." This isn't exactly my domain of expertise, but it does not sound all that beneficial to me. Of course, something can be beneficial in one way and problematic in another. Further, I would caution against selectively reading a single article.
  - 4y ago
isaacfrond 4y ago
https://archive.is/D4wDD https://archive.is/D4wDD
samwillis 4y ago
Previous discussion 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245605
bell-cot 4y ago
It'd be interesting to know whether this (shifting food consumption to earlier in the day) works differently for morning people, vs. night owls.
jesuscript 4y ago
Weight loss aside, eating a lot early just makes more sense. You can go the whole day hungry and tired, or you can go the whole day not hungry and tired. It just makes sense to put the big meal in the morning than at night.
- balfirevic 4y ago
  I'm neither hungry nor tired when I don't eat breakfast (which I almost never do).
  - annyeonghada 4y ago
    Opposite anecdote: when I tried skipping breakfast for a month I was so miserable for the entire time and my mind could only think about the time of the next meal.
    - timbit42 4y ago
      I found I have to ease into it. Move it back 30 to 60 minutes at a time.
- clevergadget 4y ago
  This is the obviously correct answer
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    Oh? Well I say that it's obviously incorrect. Checkmate.
- VLM 4y ago
  > You can go the whole day hungry Indication of a diet too high in carbs, leading to insulin levels being too high, leading to a crash in blood glucose, leading to feelings of cold and starvation. Which some people can, temporarily, white-knuckle self discipline thru, but most cannot. My personal IF is based on not feeling hungry. Sure, I'm self disciplined and hit the gym and all that, but I don't need any discipline for my diet. Self discipline is only useful for weight loss when food shopping, not when cooking or eating. I can't binge the entire pack of oreos if I don't buy a pack of oreos. And I don't feel hunger or hypoglycemic because I minimize my carb intake, which minimizes my craving for carbs. If so many companies were not making so much money selling hyperrefined carb junk food, that stuff would probably be regulated as an addictive drug. Abuse of those products certainly kills people at a young age.
marban 4y ago
More than you need to know: https://hubermanlab.com/dr-layne-norton-the-science-of-eating-for-health-fat-loss-and-lean-muscle/ https://hubermanlab.com/dr-layne-norton-the-science-of-eatin... (Just ignore the Athletic Greens BS)
xgdgsc 4y ago
I recorded my meal sizes and weight and various other features for a year and did some machine learning using gbdt and shap values. One result out of my expectation was that big breakfasts tends to help weight loss. After that I seached and found the book "the big breakfast diet". I find it in line with my data and followed this diet afterwards.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  Did you measure total daily calories based on breakfast size? I’ve found when I eat big breakfasts, I eat things like eggs that keep me full for hours, so I just eat less later
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
American issues with food always amaze me. It's like they are genetically incapable of eating less and better and need to turn everything into a competition. This time against weight. "If you eat at night obesity won't notice, because it's sleeping!". Apparently being the richest country in the World is not enough to afford healthy and quality food for everybody. Doesn't matter when you eat,if you eat less calories than those you burn you'll lose weight. Yes, it will take time of course, but the good news is it's gonna last. It's not rocket science. edit: as an experiment, start by cutting a big chunk from your portions. Many say to cut in a half, it might be too much, reduce them by 30% for a month and see what happens. If you feel like you have no energy, eat a small portion of fresh fruit, for example half a banana, an orange or two mandarins, depending on the season. Obviously Americans, who are also very touch when you point out they aren't perfect, took this personally. So to lend them a hand, I'll leave this here, it talks about Samoans, who are not as easily offended. https://samoa.un.org/en/130272-food-aplenty-poor-nutrition-undermines-good-health-samoans https://samoa.un.org/en/130272-food-aplenty-poor-nutrition-u...
- acuozzo 4y ago
  > American issues with food always amaze me. Why? It's no mystery. From a very young age American children are trained to associate daily activities with food. Americans have a food for everything and that food is present, in abundance, wherever profit is to be had. (Seriously, list an activity and I'll reply with at least one food pairing.) Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else. This requires willpower of which no person has an unlimited reserve. The basis for obesity is undeniably food addiction. How can we expect addicts to fight uphill against a system and a culture which has evolved to profit from their failure?
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else. That's exactly what always amazes me. I can't pinpoint when Americans started allowing themselves to eat unhealthy food to make someone else profit. I never witnessed it anywhere else in the World, except poor countries where access to healthy food is hard or too expensive. Of course it is not specific to USA, but nowhere it is so widespread as in the USA in my experience. As an Italian with an Italian mother, I can totally relate to the obsession for food, I am in no way fan of the constant eating and talking about food all the time, while my mother's main concern it's the perfectly stereotypical "did you eat? and what did you eat?", she's been asking the same question everyday for as long as I can remember, but it's also closely linked to eating well and healthy. What amazes me is that USA has all the potentials to be the best place in the World to eat, I've honestly ate better cooked pasta in some NY restaurant than at home in Italy, only problem is that it was unreasonably expensive, 5 times more than an expensive restaurant in the centre of Rome or Milan. Maybe it's one of those things that the market cannot fix.
theNJR 4y ago
Surprised to see this from Anahad (who just moved to WaPo) after he popularized the “fasting doesn’t help you lose weight” study back in 2020 when still at NYT.
- Fricken 4y ago
  A journalist's job is to report on the science, and remain impartial.
  - bt4u 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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thinkxl 4y ago
My nutritionist recommended to eat the three meals at the same hour. She even told me to separate them evenly thru the day, e.g., breakfast at 10, lunch at 2 (4 hours later) and dinner at 6 (again 4 hours later). This is pretty similar to sleep advice, go to bed and wake up at the same time, every day. I read somewhere that when you do things at the same hour every day your body prepare for the activity. I can't find the link, but might be curious to know if there's any study to back it up.
superamadeus 4y ago
The results described in the article talk about weight loss mostly in overweight and obese individuals. The other health benefits are improved blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity when eating in the morning rather than at night. The book “How Not to Diet” by Dr. Michael Greger has a section about this, referencing similar studies.
mkl95 4y ago
> This pattern of eating aligns with our circadian rhythms, the innate 24-hour clock that governs many aspects of our health, from our daily hormonal fluctuations and body temperatures to our sleep-wake cycles. I thought this had been debunked a while ago. Have nutritionists gone full circle?
- incomingpain 4y ago
  Nutritionism is a "science" with virtually no reproduciblity/replication. Its generally impossible to properly test diets and such. There's a tremendous history of nutrition science being published with intentional bias. Only in 2005 when you must now declare any conflicts of interest have we suddenly had huge quiet zones. Evil things in our diets in 2004 suddenly not anymore.
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  There is nothing scientific in nutrition science. Conflicts of interests, ideological diets like veganism or keto, corporate intromission, religious bias against certain food, impossibility of controlling if the participants to the study are actually following the diet, lots of self reporting and so on and on...
verdenti 4y ago
This is too bad because I rarely want to eat in the mornings. I’ve always skipped breakfast because I can’t build an appetite until lunchtime. I truly enjoy the food during dinner however.
jononomo 4y ago
Once I started eating only beef I noticed that I was just naturally hungry much less often. I've heard the same from other people who follow a diet of only red meat -- it is rare to eat more than twice a day. In fact, when I had to go off my diet a while ago during a trip to India I began getting annoyed at how often I got hungry and had to eat.
- euroderf 4y ago
  You'd probably get the same effect from chowing down on eggs. Protein does it. Also, being sick of eating eggs all the time might help curb your appetite :)
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  Does this mean you only eat red meat and nothing else? Or that beef is the only type of meat that you eat?
  - jononomo 4y ago
    During 2021 I ate only beef, eggs, fish, and cheese and I drank a fair amount of milk. I ended the year in absolutely fantastic shape. Note that this was not a keto diet because of the carbs in the milk. But it was diet without any calories from any plant-based source. During 2022 I relaxed my diet significantly, began drinking beer again, had a pizza here or there, and then gained 15 pounds of belly fat which gave me low back pain. So in October 2022, I decided that I would go back to a strict diet. I am now eating almost only beef. I'll have eggs a couple of times a week. I'm cutting back on dairy almost entirely and I am currently in ketosis as a result.
    - cookie_monsta 4y ago
      That sounds wildly unhealthy, but if you have found something that works for you, congrats.
      - jononomo 4y ago
johnea 4y ago
Please ignore all mainstream articles that have the phrase "scientist's say" in the tagline. There have been repeatedly conflicting results in studies of this subject.
robg 4y ago
https://archive.ph/ObKkk https://archive.ph/ObKkk

123 points by SirLJ 4y ago

The article consistently talks about "time of day" (e.g., morning), but it could be that "time since arising" is more relevant.

gberger 4y ago

This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better. The only explanation it gives is related to weight-loss. Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large. Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. And if eating late at night helps with that goal, then eating later can be considered healthy.

qsort 4y ago
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight This is obviously technically true, but it's like reading "domestic violence" and thinking "ah, this must be about women beating their husbands". Yes, both directions of the problem actually exist, but one is orders of magnitude more likely.
- leephillips 4y ago
  Incorrect (by orders of magnitude). Both directions have about equal rates of occurrence. Female-initiated domestic violence is somewhat more frequent than male-initiated domestic violence. https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/ https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts...
  - qsort 4y ago
    Look, I don't want to get into a fight over that because it's completely out of topic, but to claim that "25.3% of individuals have perpetrated [violence]" and "80% (sic) of individuals have perpetrated emotional abuse" means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English.
    - viridian 4y ago
      Perhaps you live in a bubble (high income, high education) if you find it completely unbelievable that a quarter of the populace will engage in domestic violence at some point in their lives. I grew up in rural Appalachia, and I can tell you that the most common response to someone, say, being called a stupid bitch, is not to channel the eternal words of Marcus Aurelius or to center ones self like the Buddha, as might be the case for your average HN poster.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Men are continually trying to paint sexism as symmetric. Doesn't matter that 99% of the corpses that result from domestic violence are women, that 1% means that it's actually a back and forth tennis match. Meanwhile, one of the most common types of mass killings is when men just decide to kill every woman they see.
      - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
        You seem to be conflating violence and murder. Yes, mens result in death more often, but data shows women and men are both comitters of domestic violence.
      - annyeonghada 4y ago
        >Men are continually trying to paint sexism as symmetric Exactly, considering that in almost every societal metric that matters men do worse than women sexism against men is much worse, nothing symmetric.
      - mrtweetyhack 4y ago
        [dead]
    - annyeonghada 4y ago
      >means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English Incredible how the same critic is never moved against women when engage in the same kind of Newspeak. Let's remember that "speech as violence" was not invented by men.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  [dead]
mrpopo 4y ago
Given the Washington Post is based in the US and has a majoritarily U.S.-based readership, and that almost 3 out of 4 adults in the U.S. are overweight, the general advice to lose weight is sound... Comparatively, less than 2% of the U.S. population is underweight. And even for these people, simply gaining weight by tricking your biological clock would not be a good advice either.
steveBK123 4y ago
The older I get the more I am pretty convinced that at the margin, every bodys digestive system and metabolism responds a little differently the time/frequency of meals, precise content of meals, amount of exercise, amount of sleep, etc. Therefore there is no "one size fits all" solution outside of the general "eat a bit less, move a bit more" guidance. It's kind of like when they interview 100+ year olds for "the tricks to a long life" and it's just inane random stuff.
- notyourday 4y ago
  One does not become 100lb overweight because of "margins". One becomes 100lb overweight because they are doing 100mph in a 35mph zone so "slow the hell down" is a great advice.
  - imustbeevil 4y ago
    You also don't become 100lb overweight because you eat your first meal at 12pm instead of 8am. That's what that comment was saying; the only obvious advice is eat less and exercise more, and it works 100% of the time for all bodies.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Yes, thank you, lol.
    - kosievdmerwe 4y ago
      And of the two eating less is more important. The human body is remarkably efficient when it comes to exercise. Also important is eating your food in a manner (e.g., smaller portions more frequently) that you don't ever get really hungry. Extreme hunger leads to binge eating which can easily undo any calory deficit you managed that day.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Of course you do. That's like saying that you don't end up $100 in debt by having a deficit of $1 a day.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
In the US, most people are overweight, not underweight. I'm not a medical student, but I can imagine that if the average American lost 10% of their excess body weight, the improvement to their health (and subsequently public health) would be enormous. But public officials don't address this like they did when I was growing up. Now we just have this weird culture of "fat acceptance", I guess to presumably spare peoples' feelings.
- andrepd 4y ago
  >Now we just have this weird culture of "fat acceptance", I guess to presumably spare peoples' feelings. The USA obesity epidemic has been undergoing for decades. I highly doubt "anti-fatphobia" tiktoks are to blame here.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  You’re not a medical student, so you wouldn’t know, but it’s well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter. So sparing their feelings about their fatness is actually the correct behavior if we want to encourage the average American to lose weight. A fat person isn’t ignorant about their fatness, but not treating them any different for being fat is actually the path to get them thin.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    >It's well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter. Thanks for the downvote. That doesn't mean that doctors shouldn't tell their patients to lose some freaking weight if they're obese. Fat sympathy is a cultural problem. But also all the seed oils, sugars, and fakeness in our foods is another problem.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I didn’t downvote you. Im just telling you that displays of fat shaming actually make fat people fatter, statistically, while there’s no evidence that fat sympathy does the same (and in fact might do the opposite).
kome 4y ago
"This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better." It does: "Because of the way our internal clocks operate, our bodies are primed to digest and metabolize food early in the day. As the day progresses, our metabolisms become less efficient."
- jeltz 4y ago
  Which should mean the opposite, that eating later in the day is better for weightloss.
  - kome 4y ago
    why? that's not how metabolism works
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mmh0000 4y ago
      They’re confused by the word efficiency. They’re assuming that if metabolism is inefficient then it must take more energy to process food. Thus, more calories burned, thus weightloss.
  - thomascgalvin 4y ago
    Digest and metabolize. This would mean that early in the day, you digest food and put it to work. Your body temperature is higher, you fidget more, your body repairs some of the damage you did when you worked out last night. Later in the day, the food you digest sits around. Your body temperature is lower, you fidget less, your body performs less maintenance and repair. But the body isn't wasteful; it's still built to survive periodic famine. So, those extra calories that are just sitting around get stored away for later.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  It also mentions ghrelin and leptin
simonsarris 4y ago
> Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large. Being overweight and diabetes are comorbidities of nearly everything, and are comorbidities of each-other for that matter. People are more overweight than ever. If anything there is not nearly enough alarm, and far too much normalization of the increasing status quo. > Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. Approximately 1.5% of US adults are underweight. Approximately 73.6% are overweight or obese.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  There's so much to unpack beyond these surface-level statistics, though. Like how there's some evidence that the health risks associated with increased BMI are partially an artifact of weight loss diets being really bad for your health, plus selection bias. People with lower BMIs are significantly less likely to attempt these health-destroying weight loss diets in the first place. Which would then imply that an approach to the issue that focuses primarily on how to get people who are already fat to lose weight, rather than as a prevention-focused public health initiative, may be doing more harm than good. Or how lumping the overweight and obese groups together is a great example of lying with statistics by gerrymandering the BMI quantiles that seem to be healthiest together with those that have the poorest health outcomes, and away from a group that was arbitrarily defined the better part of two centuries ago based on one person's aesthetic standards rather than any health indicators, most of which weren't even known at the time. In other words, it's the crux of a pervasive piece of statistical circular reasoning. And the moralizing statements like "normalization of the increasing status quo" that politicize the issue, thereby making it harder to have a nuanced, thoughtful discussion about the topic, and instead push it toward always being yet another pea shooting contest between the "personal responsibility" and "fat positivitiy" caucuses. Which only serves to drown out any attempt to really contend with the full magnitude of the nuances and unknowns that surround this issue.
  - jagraff 4y ago
    This is nonsense. Obesity doesn’t cause health issues because of crash diets - the link between obesity and several bad health outcomes (insulin resistance/diabetes, hypertension, joint damage, to name a few) is extremely well established, and has nothing to do with diet and everything to do with the accumulation of superhuman levels of fat relative to the conditions in which humans evolved. You’re right that there is some controversy about where exactly the line for “overweight” should be, but there’s no question that when you get into the obese category (41% of Americans) it is extremely bad for your health, irrespective of what diet you’re on - humans simply aren’t designed to handle the amount of fat we now routinely accumulate.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. I'm sure given 7-8 billion people in the world this might be "true" for some value of "lots", but I'm curious where data backs this assertion for the audience for which this article is intended; where food is overabundant and mostly overprocessed.
fsloth 4y ago
“Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy“ Reference needed. Being overweight most definitely is a health risk. What kind of risk exactly is then probably related to personal biology of each individual but I guess the list to pick from is quite long - diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, joint problems etc. Ofc weight is not the only relevant metric but it is relevant still.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  I understood the post differently. For example, I am not overweight, never have been. I am interested in reading about healthy eating. I'm not interested in losing weight, as that would be unhealthy for me. Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight. Thus the two issues (health and weight loss) are conflated.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    Look up the book perfect health diet
  - fsloth 4y ago
    Generally people conflate health and weight because globally, for a very large number of people, this is the main problem. As societies move to western diets, the average person becomes overweight and is diagnosed with one or more health problems directly related to obesity (pick one or more from my list above). This is the easy problem to diagnose. The connection between nutrition and health, if obesity is not your concern, seems indeed to be far more nuanced and complex. I'm not sure if anyone has come up with anything better that every expert could agree on except "eat little bit of everything". I suppose fasting seems to improve biological markers even for non-obese people so it's not only about weight loss as such, though.
  - thomascgalvin 4y ago
    > I am interested in reading about healthy eating.... Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight. I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that industrial food owns the food science in this country, and in most of the developed world. For decades, we were fed (no pun intended) a Food Pyramid that is a blatant lie, because it correlated to how monied interests wanted to feed the nation. I had my annual physical last week, and my doctor told me that the consensus is now "eat whole, natural, unprocessed foods as much as possible, and probably cut back on meat." That seems reasonable, on its face. It also seems prohibitively expensive for many people. I'm afraid that there isn't a great solution to this problem in this country, almost by design.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. Maybe in places of famine, but the target audience is western, specifically American. Emaciation is hardly a problem in the US. Obesity is. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Sure, it may not be enough to simply aim at weight reduction (most probably have bad diets to begin with), but weight loss is definitely important and healthy.
- stinkytaco 4y ago
  The great irony is that while emaciation is hardly a problem, malnutrition is. It's a country that is both malnourished and obese and there just doesn't seem to be much of a public policy push to change that.
  - thomascgalvin 4y ago
    I would suspect that malnourishment leads to obesity, at least in part. When you stuff yourself with empty calories, your body is left unsatisfied, because it's missing important nutrients. This leads to hunger signals, which leads to eating more empty calories, which leads to ...
VLM 4y ago
This is the main problem with social media in its declining era. "I encourage my competitors to take some really bad advice" simply becomes tiresome when the rest of the traffic has been pushed away and that's all that remains in the social media sphere.
icare_1er 4y ago
" Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier" >> No. A few people. Very few. Lots need to lose weight to be healthier.
- master-lincoln 4y ago
  According to a BBC article from 2016 [0] there were an estimated 641 million overweight people on earth and 462 million underweight people. I wouldn't call that "very few". [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-35933691 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-35933691
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    I bet most of those half a billion underweight people are not going to be reading the Washington Post, or even worrying about dietary advice it's from a us-based news outlet. I thoroughly approve of the quibble though.
hericium 4y ago
> This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better. I feel like it's a personal preference and I only eat later in a day, but here[1] you may find some explanations on why eating in the morning may be better. [1] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-intermittent-fasting-boost-health-restrict.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-intermittent-fasting-...

civilized 4y ago

Interesting direction, but didn't see any quantification of the impact (of eating earlier in the day) on long-term health indicators. Hopefully we will see that later if this has any substance.

panchicore3 4y ago

There is a tab-or-space discussion around whether skipping breakfast is okay or not. Personally I feel way better when I plan to skip it for a few weeks, I feel the spark of feeling activated and feel less hungry during the day. I won't skip it on weekends I feel like I deserve that glorious breakfast though.

euroderf 4y ago
I preferred to skip breakfast, but filter coffee on an empty stomach would leave me with two days of brutal heartburn. Switching long-term to espresso made my tummy much happier and let me skip (or delay) breakfasts once again. YMMV.
- VLM 4y ago
  > filter coffee on an empty stomach Freshly brewed higher quality looseleaf tea (no cheap supermarket tea bags) with nothing added is much less acidic than filter coffee.

jeltz 4y ago

If our metabolisms become less efficient the later in the day shouldn't that mean you want to eat late if the goal is to lose weight?

bell-cot 4y ago
It's looks poorly worded. I thing they're trying to say that late-day metabolism is less efficient at signalling the brain "plenty of food down here in the stomach, so flip the Hunger Bit to 0 now".

ldoughty 4y ago

Firstly: the two mentions of sample sizes are 485 and 16. The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time") Next; there's no details on why. > "the study found that eating later caused the participants to burn less fat and fewer calories, and pushed their fat cells to store more fat." This makes little sense.. unless the users activity level changes, the only other calorie burning I'm aware of is your base metabolic rate.. so eating later is possibly slowing down your metabolic rate?

ldoughty 4y ago
On a related topic: wouldn't the "time in body" be a larger factor on weight loss? Most nutrients are extracted I'm the intestines, so meals earlier in the day, followed by afternoon coffee and afternoon/evening vigorous exercise should mean you extract get calories from your food as these activities encourage your body to push through food without digesting them as fully...
stdbrouw 4y ago
> The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time") This is typically how it's done though: if you were to make a subselection of the treatment group to only include those that adhered to the intervention then (a) you risk undoing the randomization, because people who are more likely to adhere to the protocol are likely different in other ways as well and (b) the effect size you'd report would be a best case scenario, not realistically the kinds of results a dietician would see when helping people.
darkstar999 4y ago
> there's no details on why. It's explained in the paragraph right before the one you quoted. >A look at their hormone levels showed why: Eating later caused their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, to spike, while simultaneously suppressing their levels of leptin, a hormone that causes satiety.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

Different strokes for different folks. Although the article advocates for eating breakfast, I found what works best for me was skipping breakfast, skipping lunch, and eating a single meal a day, also known as OMAD (one meal a day). For me, this intermittent fasting routine started back in July 2022, when I initially starting experimenting. Net result: lost 20 pounds and 5 months later, glad to report not only has the weight stayed off but my (fasted) glucose levels dropped to below prediabetic levels (i.e. 99 mg/dL)

verdenti 4y ago
Exactly, I’ve done OMAD continuously for two years now and it has worked well for me. The only thing you should be looking at is it’s hard to get all your vitamins and minerals from one meal a day so make sure you take a multivitamin.

Aromasin 4y ago

Another preachy diet article? Oh joy. I read a journal article saying the opposite to this one, just 2 weeks ago; how it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when (protein and fats in the morning, carbs in the evening - which funny enough the article above actually denounces). It results in better sleep and as such, improved health and longevity. Eat what you want, when you want, and provided it's not too much or too processed then you'll likely be validating one study or another. I wish click-bait diet article fluff would crawl back into the tabloid, gas stations magazines they crawled from.

tylervigen 4y ago
> it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when That doesn’t seem to contradict the article. They both acknowledge that what and when you eat are important.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  To quote the article directly: >Morning carbs are better than late-day carbs. That's in direct conflict with an article I read just two weeks ago, when carbs in the evening where best. Diet articles are always contradictions, regardless of source it seems..

rybosworld 4y ago

Skipping a meal/shrinking your eating window can have enormous benefits. There was discussion on this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309170 Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28490511/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28490511/

vnorilo 4y ago
I used to "forget" breakfast and lunch and didn't really feel that hungry, then have a big meal and keep snacking until bedtime. Weight gain and bad sleep followed. Nowadays I make a game-like goal of "be hungry at lunch time". To do that I need to stop getting calories at ~6PM. I'll have just black coffee and water when waking up and lunch at 11AM. I sleep much better, dental health and blood pressure have improved, weight is slowly going down. In addition I crave for stuff like broccoli, mushrooms and protein at the early lunch time - unlike the fries and pizza I desired before when eating a super late lunch at 4PM or so. Later learned my current strategy is called intermittent fasting. Works great for me.
kmmlng 4y ago
> Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner Beneficial in what way? A couple of quotes from the article you linked: "In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis" "Increased fat oxidation, despite higher postprandial insulin concentrations with breakfast skipping, suggests the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may increase metabolic risk over time." "Altogether, the present results support the association between breakfast skipping and disturbed glucose homeostasis, which is not explained by a positive energy balance." This isn't exactly my domain of expertise, but it does not sound all that beneficial to me. Of course, something can be beneficial in one way and problematic in another. Further, I would caution against selectively reading a single article.
- 4y ago

isaacfrond 4y ago

https://archive.is/D4wDD https://archive.is/D4wDD

samwillis 4y ago

Previous discussion 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245605

bell-cot 4y ago

It'd be interesting to know whether this (shifting food consumption to earlier in the day) works differently for morning people, vs. night owls.

jesuscript 4y ago

Weight loss aside, eating a lot early just makes more sense. You can go the whole day hungry and tired, or you can go the whole day not hungry and tired. It just makes sense to put the big meal in the morning than at night.

balfirevic 4y ago
I'm neither hungry nor tired when I don't eat breakfast (which I almost never do).
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  Opposite anecdote: when I tried skipping breakfast for a month I was so miserable for the entire time and my mind could only think about the time of the next meal.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    I found I have to ease into it. Move it back 30 to 60 minutes at a time.
clevergadget 4y ago
This is the obviously correct answer
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  Oh? Well I say that it's obviously incorrect. Checkmate.
VLM 4y ago
> You can go the whole day hungry Indication of a diet too high in carbs, leading to insulin levels being too high, leading to a crash in blood glucose, leading to feelings of cold and starvation. Which some people can, temporarily, white-knuckle self discipline thru, but most cannot. My personal IF is based on not feeling hungry. Sure, I'm self disciplined and hit the gym and all that, but I don't need any discipline for my diet. Self discipline is only useful for weight loss when food shopping, not when cooking or eating. I can't binge the entire pack of oreos if I don't buy a pack of oreos. And I don't feel hunger or hypoglycemic because I minimize my carb intake, which minimizes my craving for carbs. If so many companies were not making so much money selling hyperrefined carb junk food, that stuff would probably be regulated as an addictive drug. Abuse of those products certainly kills people at a young age.

marban 4y ago

More than you need to know: https://hubermanlab.com/dr-layne-norton-the-science-of-eating-for-health-fat-loss-and-lean-muscle/ https://hubermanlab.com/dr-layne-norton-the-science-of-eatin... (Just ignore the Athletic Greens BS)

xgdgsc 4y ago

I recorded my meal sizes and weight and various other features for a year and did some machine learning using gbdt and shap values. One result out of my expectation was that big breakfasts tends to help weight loss. After that I seached and found the book "the big breakfast diet". I find it in line with my data and followed this diet afterwards.

curiousllama 4y ago
Did you measure total daily calories based on breakfast size? I’ve found when I eat big breakfasts, I eat things like eggs that keep me full for hours, so I just eat less later

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

American issues with food always amaze me. It's like they are genetically incapable of eating less and better and need to turn everything into a competition. This time against weight. "If you eat at night obesity won't notice, because it's sleeping!". Apparently being the richest country in the World is not enough to afford healthy and quality food for everybody. Doesn't matter when you eat,if you eat less calories than those you burn you'll lose weight. Yes, it will take time of course, but the good news is it's gonna last. It's not rocket science. edit: as an experiment, start by cutting a big chunk from your portions. Many say to cut in a half, it might be too much, reduce them by 30% for a month and see what happens. If you feel like you have no energy, eat a small portion of fresh fruit, for example half a banana, an orange or two mandarins, depending on the season. Obviously Americans, who are also very touch when you point out they aren't perfect, took this personally. So to lend them a hand, I'll leave this here, it talks about Samoans, who are not as easily offended. https://samoa.un.org/en/130272-food-aplenty-poor-nutrition-undermines-good-health-samoans https://samoa.un.org/en/130272-food-aplenty-poor-nutrition-u...

acuozzo 4y ago
> American issues with food always amaze me. Why? It's no mystery. From a very young age American children are trained to associate daily activities with food. Americans have a food for everything and that food is present, in abundance, wherever profit is to be had. (Seriously, list an activity and I'll reply with at least one food pairing.) Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else. This requires willpower of which no person has an unlimited reserve. The basis for obesity is undeniably food addiction. How can we expect addicts to fight uphill against a system and a culture which has evolved to profit from their failure?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else. That's exactly what always amazes me. I can't pinpoint when Americans started allowing themselves to eat unhealthy food to make someone else profit. I never witnessed it anywhere else in the World, except poor countries where access to healthy food is hard or too expensive. Of course it is not specific to USA, but nowhere it is so widespread as in the USA in my experience. As an Italian with an Italian mother, I can totally relate to the obsession for food, I am in no way fan of the constant eating and talking about food all the time, while my mother's main concern it's the perfectly stereotypical "did you eat? and what did you eat?", she's been asking the same question everyday for as long as I can remember, but it's also closely linked to eating well and healthy. What amazes me is that USA has all the potentials to be the best place in the World to eat, I've honestly ate better cooked pasta in some NY restaurant than at home in Italy, only problem is that it was unreasonably expensive, 5 times more than an expensive restaurant in the centre of Rome or Milan. Maybe it's one of those things that the market cannot fix.

theNJR 4y ago

Surprised to see this from Anahad (who just moved to WaPo) after he popularized the “fasting doesn’t help you lose weight” study back in 2020 when still at NYT.

Fricken 4y ago
A journalist's job is to report on the science, and remain impartial.
- bt4u 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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thinkxl 4y ago

My nutritionist recommended to eat the three meals at the same hour. She even told me to separate them evenly thru the day, e.g., breakfast at 10, lunch at 2 (4 hours later) and dinner at 6 (again 4 hours later). This is pretty similar to sleep advice, go to bed and wake up at the same time, every day. I read somewhere that when you do things at the same hour every day your body prepare for the activity. I can't find the link, but might be curious to know if there's any study to back it up.

superamadeus 4y ago

The results described in the article talk about weight loss mostly in overweight and obese individuals. The other health benefits are improved blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity when eating in the morning rather than at night. The book “How Not to Diet” by Dr. Michael Greger has a section about this, referencing similar studies.

mkl95 4y ago

> This pattern of eating aligns with our circadian rhythms, the innate 24-hour clock that governs many aspects of our health, from our daily hormonal fluctuations and body temperatures to our sleep-wake cycles. I thought this had been debunked a while ago. Have nutritionists gone full circle?

incomingpain 4y ago
Nutritionism is a "science" with virtually no reproduciblity/replication. Its generally impossible to properly test diets and such. There's a tremendous history of nutrition science being published with intentional bias. Only in 2005 when you must now declare any conflicts of interest have we suddenly had huge quiet zones. Evil things in our diets in 2004 suddenly not anymore.
annyeonghada 4y ago
There is nothing scientific in nutrition science. Conflicts of interests, ideological diets like veganism or keto, corporate intromission, religious bias against certain food, impossibility of controlling if the participants to the study are actually following the diet, lots of self reporting and so on and on...

verdenti 4y ago

This is too bad because I rarely want to eat in the mornings. I’ve always skipped breakfast because I can’t build an appetite until lunchtime. I truly enjoy the food during dinner however.

jononomo 4y ago

Once I started eating only beef I noticed that I was just naturally hungry much less often. I've heard the same from other people who follow a diet of only red meat -- it is rare to eat more than twice a day. In fact, when I had to go off my diet a while ago during a trip to India I began getting annoyed at how often I got hungry and had to eat.

euroderf 4y ago
You'd probably get the same effect from chowing down on eggs. Protein does it. Also, being sick of eating eggs all the time might help curb your appetite :)
cookie_monsta 4y ago
Does this mean you only eat red meat and nothing else? Or that beef is the only type of meat that you eat?
- jononomo 4y ago
  During 2021 I ate only beef, eggs, fish, and cheese and I drank a fair amount of milk. I ended the year in absolutely fantastic shape. Note that this was not a keto diet because of the carbs in the milk. But it was diet without any calories from any plant-based source. During 2022 I relaxed my diet significantly, began drinking beer again, had a pizza here or there, and then gained 15 pounds of belly fat which gave me low back pain. So in October 2022, I decided that I would go back to a strict diet. I am now eating almost only beef. I'll have eggs a couple of times a week. I'm cutting back on dairy almost entirely and I am currently in ketosis as a result.
  - cookie_monsta 4y ago
    That sounds wildly unhealthy, but if you have found something that works for you, congrats.
    - jononomo 4y ago

johnea 4y ago

Please ignore all mainstream articles that have the phrase "scientist's say" in the tagline. There have been repeatedly conflicting results in studies of this subject.

robg 4y ago

https://archive.ph/ObKkk https://archive.ph/ObKkk