Health
Science confirms it: eating dinner at this time could improve your health considerably
Your overall health can be significantly impacted by the eating schedule you keep each day, experts warn.

Eating too close to bedtime can be harmful to your health, experts appear to agree. But how long should you leave between dinner and turning in?
What time should you eat dinner in the evening?
According to the Sleep Foundation’s Danielle Pacheco and Dr. Abhinav Singh, you should allow two to four hours between eating your last meal of the day and going to bed.
Dr. Valter Longo, the director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, offers similar advice, telling an interview with GQ magazine this week that you should have dinner at least three hours before bed.
What happens if you have dinner too late?
If you’re too full when you get into bed, Dr. Longo explains, you risk disrupting your body’s circadian rhythm - the internal clock that regulates your sleep-wake pattern over the course of a 24-hour day.
“If you push your dinner later and later, the message to your system is [that] you should still be active,” Dr. Longo tells GQ.
What’s more, you may also expose yourself to physical complaints such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), also known as acid reflux. Pacheco and Dr. Singh explain that GERD “occurs when the contents of the stomach return back up the esophagus”. Your espophagus is the tube that carries the food you eat from your mouth to the stomach.
“When a person lies down right after eating, the contents of the stomach can press against the lower esophageal sphincter, causing irritation and acid reflux,” Pacheco and Dr. Singh note.
In a 2005 study published in the US’s National Library of Medicine, researchers found that a shorter period between dinner and bed was “significantly associated” with increased incidences of acid reflux.
Major symptoms of acid reflux include heartburn, nausea and the taste of stomach acid in your mouth, according to the US’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Eat within a 12-hour window, experts advise
If you push your evening meal back too late, you may also be giving your body an insufficient window of time between eating dinner and the point at which you have breakfast the following day.
Among people who survive past the age of 100, Dr. Longo reveals in his interview with GQ, a not uncommon eating habit is to have an insubstantial evening meal, then leave around 12 hours before breakfast the next morning.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr. Adam Collins, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Surrey in the UK, agrees that you can have a positive impact on your health by leaving a significant period between dinner and breakfast, and by doing all your eating within a window of 12 hours or less each day.
After around 12 hours of fasting, he explains, we allow our body to begin breaking down stored up fat for energy, rather than focusing on burning up newly consumed fuel. This is a process known as ‘metabolic switching’.
By avoiding what Dr. Collins calls “fuel mismanagement”, restricting your daily eating window can you to lose weight if you need to, and to enjoy greater overall health.
“All the things we associate with poor metabolic health and disease risk – cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, diabetes and low energy – are essentially a manifestation of fuel mismanagement”, Dr. Collins tells the BBC. “Eating in a grazing pattern means you’re not able to store, liberate and utilise fuel in the right way.”
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