Maintaining a healthy diet is associated with the times when people eat most of their food, or so indicates an investigation that was presented at the European and International Conference on Obesity. This study found that people who consume most of their calories at night, tend to consume more and have a lower quality diet. Precisely, the objective of this study was to explore the connection between the consumption of calories at night, the measure of energy intake (EI) and diet quality. Previous studies found that hunger follows a daily rhythm and that this rhythm, somehow, is not what people think. Although people often stop eating during a prolonged period of sleep, they break that fast with what is usually the smallest meal of the day. Conversely, hunger tends to be strongest at the end of the day, peaking around 8 p.m., after most people have completed most of their daily activities. The consumption of energy intake naturally tends to be a response to hunger, and other research has delved into the effect of meal timing on metabolism and other bodily processes. This new study, however, looked at its implications for the quantity and quality of food that people consume.
Data used for the study
Beginning in 2008, the UK’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) collected detailed information on food consumption, nutrient intake and nutritional status of people older than 18 months. Thus, each year, the survey collected responses from a representative sample of 1,000 people. In this way, the researchers analyzed data from 1,177 adults who participated in the survey from 2012 to 2017. Overall, the researchers found that participants consumed, on average, nearly 40% (39.8%) of their energy intake after six pm. Looking more closely at the data, the researchers divided people according to the proportion of their daily EI they consumed after six. Thus, people in the lowest quartile consumed less than 31.4% of your EI at night, while those in the highest quartile ate more than 48.6% during night hours.
