A group of researchers from the Salk Institute have found in a new study that eating within a certain time frame can help you stay thinner no matter what is on your plate.
The study suggests an 8-12 hour time frame for eating meals, as opposed to eating large evening meals after a long day at work, according to Next Shark. The research team discovered that what you eat doesn't have as much of an impact on your weight, cholesterol levels and risk for diabetes as the time frames within which you eat.
Satchidananda Panda, Salk professor and lead author of the study, said the results were found through observing animals' eating behavior, and that 8-12 hour window gave animals more health benefits than they would have gained eating the same foods at any time of the day.
The experiment involved 400 mice that were put on different time-restricted feeding schedules in which they had diets that were either high or low in fat and sugar. Mice restricted to eating only during 9-12 hour time frames stayed leaner regardless of their diet, and some of these mice were allowed to binge freely on the weekends and still managed to stay as thin as those that didn't. This showed that mice can avoid interruptions with this diet.
The results showed that human genes follow a rhythm-like synchronicity for consumption and expenditure of calories, Next Shark reported.
"You don't really have to calorie count," said Amir Zarranpar, one of the researchers involved in the study. "What this really works on is your own biology and letting your body use its own evolutionary metabolic pathways to shuttle energy appropriately."
The team plans on testing the time-restricted eating schedules on humans to see how well this diet can help humans stay in shape.
The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
