Limiting eating to daytime could ward off high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity, according to a new study that says even a high-fat diet can be less harmful than a normal diet that includes late-night snacking.
"These days, most of the advice is, 'You have to change nutrition, you have to eat a healthy diet,'" says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in California. "But many people don't have access to healthy diets. So the question is, without access to a healthy diet, can they still practice time-restricted feeding and reap some benefit?"
Panda tested his time-restricted feeding method on mice, including a 2012 experiment in which half the mice were given a high-fat diet over the course of eight hours per day.
They remained slim and in good health, whereas their counterparts who were fed the same diet with unlimited access did not, despite consuming the same number of calories.
In the new study, Panda and his team worked with almost 400 mice, whose weight ran the gamut from normal to obese, and subjected them to several diet plans with varying lengths of time restriction.
Some diets were high in fat, others high in fat and sucrose or high in fructose alone. Time restrictions were between nine and 12 hours.
Regardless of the mouse's weight at the start of the intervention, time-restricted feeding emerged the winner in the majority of cases, despite the nature of the diet and the length of the restriction.
The three categories of time restriction that resulted in lean mice were nine, 10 and 12 hours long, while a group whose time restriction spanned 15 hours experienced less pronounced benefits.
The research team allowed a group of mice to eat at liberty on weekends and, despite that, they gained less weight than the mice that were not placed under a time restriction at all.
What's more, mice given unrestricted access to a balanced diet had less lean muscle mass than their littermates who underwent the time-restricted intervention.
The study was
published in the journal Cell Metabolism.