Are you focusing all your time and attention to the number of calories and the type of meals you are eating everyday. Perhaps you need to plan a little more for a sustainable weight-loss strategy. According to a latest study, the time at which you take your meals also plays a determining role in how the calories in your body are burnt. According to a study published in the journal Plos Biology, biological clock and sleep regulate how the food you eat is metabolized, therefore the choice of burning fats or carbohydrates varies depending on the time of day or night.
Your body’s circadian rhythm has programmed your body to burn fat when you sleep, so when you skip breakfast and then a snack at night you delay burning the fat.
For the study, researchers monitored the metabolism of mid-aged and older subjects in a whole-room respiratory chamber using a ‘random crossover’ experimental design. The analysis was conducted over two separate 56-hour long sessions. In each session, lunch and dinner were presented at the same times (12:30 and 17:45, respectively), however the timing of the third meal differed between the two halves of the study.
Thus in one of the 56-hour bouts, the additional daily meal was presented as breakfast (8:00) whereas, in the other session, a nutritionally equivalent meal was presented to the same subjects as a late-evening snack (22:00). The duration of the overnight fast was the same for both sessions.
It must be noted that the two sessions did not differ in the amount or type of food eaten or in the subjects’ activity levels. The daily timing of nutrient availability, in addition with clock/sleep control of metabolism, flipped a switch in the subjects’ fat/carbohydrate preference in such a way that the late-evening snack session resulted in less fat burned when compared to the breakfast session.
Therefore it could be inferred that the timing of meals affect the extent to which ingested food is stored or burnt.
A daily fast between the evening meal and breakfast may help optimize weight management, the study suggested. One needs to be very careful of eating meals on time.
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