Few lifestyle choices come with as much cultural baggage as when to eat dinner. There are all the national stereotypes: Americans eat early, Italians eat late, and Spaniards eat even later. An early dinner opens up the evening. A late dinner can be an event in and of itself.<\/p>\n
But is there a best time to eat dinner from a health perspective? Sort of. What you definitely want to do, says Valter Longo<\/a>, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, is finish your food at least three hours before you plan to go to sleep. If your usual bedtime is midnight, for example, you\u2019ve got a 9 pm deadline.<\/p>\n This is because eating too late can disrupt the circadian rhythms which govern how our body transitions from day to night and back again. \u201cIf you push your dinner later and later, the message to your system is [that] you should still be active,\u201d says Longo. It might negatively affect your sleep (the same way being exposed to bright light before bed will do) and how efficiently you burn calories.<\/p>\n When you eat dinner also dictates the total time you fast between the last meal of one day and the first one of the next. This is what \u201ctime-restricted eating\u201d\u2014a type of intermittent fasting<\/a> that involves keeping all your day\u2019s meals in a window of 12 hours or less\u2014is concerned with, says Adam Collins<\/a>, associate professor of nutrition at the University of Surrey. If you extend your overnight fast between dinner and breakfast, \u201cthen you\u2019re allowing your body to go into the more catabolic phase, where you\u2019re shifting to oxidizing fats. You\u2019re training the body to do what it\u2019s designed to do: burn carbs when you\u2019re eating carbs, and then burn fat when you\u2019re not.\u201d This can help with weight loss and is generally good for your metabolic health.<\/p>\n Should eating in a restricted window mean making your breakfast later or your dinner earlier? \u201cThe consensus seems to be that you get more bang for your buck if you restrict your calories to earlier in the day,\u201d says Collins. \u201cThat makes sense from a circadian perspective, because you\u2019re geared up to deal with food in the early period of your active phase.\u201d<\/p>\n The most common habit among centenarians, says Longo, is a \u201clight dinner\u201d early enough to allow 12 hours to pass before breakfast the following day. Eating less later in the day sounds healthy too, at least if we believe the old saying instructing us to \u201ceat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few lifestyle choices come with as much cultural baggage as when to eat dinner. There are all the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[9013,102,6958,6636,43086,9012,56,54,55,7268],"class_list":{"0":"post-234697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-digital_syndication","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-longevity","11":"tag-nutrition","12":"tag-sleep-and-recovery","13":"tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom","17":"tag-wellness"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}