Well, maybe not.
Two new papers printed in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society suggest that it's not merely what you eat, however when you eat that influences your overall health. Having irregular foods may set you up for obesity, high bloodstream pressure, and type 2 diabetes--regardless showing how many total calories you're eating.
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Among the reviews analyzed international eating patterns and found a possible website link between obesity and eating more calories in the evening. The other newspaper concluded that folks who constantly ate six meals a day had better hypercholesteria and insulin levels than patients who ate foods with variable frequency--in this case, from three to nine meals a day.
"We found that people consuming calories during regular meals--at similar times from one day to [the] next--were less obese than people who have irregular meals, despite consuming more calories overall, " says Gerda Weed, PhD, a visiting lecturer in the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division at King's College London who worked on both documents.
Really? While it will not seem to be to make sense that meal timing could affect your health that much, the studies are part of an growing field called chrononutrition, through which researchers are exploring the link between metabolism and circadian rhythms.
Many metabolic processes in the body--such as appetite, digestion, and the metabolism of fats, cholesterol, and glucose--follow habits that repeat every twenty four hours, explains Pot. "Eating inconsistently may affect our internal body clock, inch she says. Which dysfunction might lead to weight gain and other health risks.
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But just how significant is the impact of varying your food times?
"This is a really important and valid question which we sadly cannot answer yet, inch says Pot. "It would be of great interest to fully understand how much impact disruptions in our circadian rhythms could have on [our] obesity risk. inches
So for now, it seems like a smart idea to eat at the same times every day if you can. But if weight loss, there are lots of other ways to stay healthy, too.
