Most of you already know that weight gain, diabetes and heart attacks are associated with eating pro-inflammatory foods such as mammal meat, sugar-added foods and fried foods. However, you may not know that people who eat their meals very fast (an average of less than six minutes), snack after supper just before going to sleep, or who skip breakfast, are also at increased risk for these three conditions
• People who eat fast are about 60 percent more likely to have the high blood triglyceride levels that come from having high blood sugar levels after meals. Researchers used a self-monitoring wearable device to demonstrate that eating hard foods and restricting processed foods that are soft caused normal weight people to eat more slowly so they ate less food
• A seven-year, self-reported speed-of-eating study of middle-aged Japanese men found that faster eating was associated with increased weight gain and becoming diabetic
• Avoiding soft processed foods and eating meals slowly reduced hunger and food intake
• Stomach X rays of competitive speed eaters showed that their stomachs were enormous flaccid sacs capable of accommodating huge amounts of food, and they were at increased risk for nausea, vomiting, stomach paralysis and morbid obesity
How Eating Very Fast May Harm You
When your stomach is empty, it produces a hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. When you eat, your stomach fills up with food, since no solid food is allowed to pass from your stomach into your intestines. This stretches your stomach so it stops producing the hormone called ghrelin, so you are less hungry and stop eating. However, it usually takes more than 20 minutes for ghrelin to quiet down your hunger center in your brain. Ghrelin suppression after they ate a meal was far quicker and greater in the slow-eating group than the fast-eating group. Three hours after eating, the slow eaters had consumed an average of 25 percent less energy from snacks
Time of Eating Also Affects Weight Gain and Risk for Diabetes and Heart Attacks
• Having the largest meal early in the day and eating most of your daily food during lunch help to prevent excess weight gain
• Eating a large breakfast and a small dinner is associated with reduced risk for high blood sugar levels in diabetics
• A review of 20 studies found that overweight people who stopped eating in the evening for at least four weeks had lower fasting blood sugars, insulin and HbA1c
• The French NutriNet-Sante study found that eating dinner late in the evening is associated with increased risk for both heart attacks and strokes
Don’t Eat and Go to Bed
• Skiping breakfast has been associated with overweight and obesity
• Eating just before going to bed at night was associated with increased heart attack risk (J Am Heart Assoc, 2020;9:e016455), obesity, high cholesterol and diabetes in women
• Eating late breakfasts tends to make longer overnight fasts so you may feel hungrier later on in the day, leading to higher food intake and increased insulin production. Skipping breakfast has also been associated with higher morning blood pressure and cholesterol levels
Why Late Dinners are Less Healthful
Eating dinner just before you go to bed causes higher rises in blood sugar levels and increased amounts of fat to be deposited in fat cells while you are sleeping. Resting muscles draw almost no sugar from the bloodstream and what little they do remove from the bloodstream requires insulin
• You burn the lowest amount of calories when you sleep. When you go to sleep after eating, you burn fewer calories from that food so more of it is stored as fat
• Cortisol levels are higher during sleep and raise blood sugar levels by blocking the effects of insulin
• Changing the evening mealtime of non-obese men from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM significantly increased their markers for becoming obese and developing diabetes
My Recommendations
The least healthful time to eat is just before you go to bed, and the most healthful times to eat are before you exercise or within an hour after you finish exercising
