If we were to ask you how many times a day you ate, you, like most people would reply "thrice."
But a new app and research project that helps us record exactly how much we eat has come up with surprising results: Most people eat for 15 hours a day and have a daily average intake of 1,947 calories. And more than 33 percent of calories are consumed after 6 p.m. while only about 25 percent are consumed by noon.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., with 150 non-dieting, non-shift-working people in and around San Diego for three weeks and has been published in the journal Cell Metabolism, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Most people were found to be eating "frequently and erratically" throughout the day.
"People eat as soon as they wake up and roughly eat as long as they are awake. This means they are fasting only when they sleep," lead researcher Satchidananda Panda told The Huffington Post.
"This has a huge impact on how we interpret the data on sleep and obesity/diabetes," Panda continued. "Since short sleep correlates with obesity/diabetes, it implies people who sleep less may be munching as long as they are awake."
And considering the 24/7 lifestyle of most Americans, it is a scary thought.
To conduct his research, Panda developed an app called MyCycardianClock.Users are required to take a photo of anything that they eat or drink with the app. The photo, along with any typed notes, geolocation and other metadata, is sent to the researchers' servers - much like a food journal. But the difference is that the researchers wanted to record eating habits, rather than influence them. So the app deletes the images from participants' phones, giving scientists an opportunity to identify dietary patterns over time.
To lose weight the Salk researchers have suggested a nightly fast of 10 to 12 hours, not just to limit the consumption of excess calories but to "reset" a circadian clock disturbed by 24/7 feeding.
Eight participants, all overweight or obese and following a general "eating day" spanning more than 14 hours, were recruited to show the benefits of resetting the circadian clock. The participants were asked to limit their consumption of anything with more than five calories to a 10- to 12-hour span each day and to fast for the remaining 12 to 14 hours. After 16 weeks, the participants reported losing an average of just over 7 pounds.
Though the study is over, the app is still available to anyone willing to contribute his or her data to a Salk Institute study being conducted under customary academic strictures. At the end of the mandatory two weeks, the program generates and shares with the participant a "feedogram," which analyzes and records his or her dietary intake patterns.
