What are the best times of day to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner?

We are obsessed with taking care of ourselves. But we focus so much on what and in what proportions to eatthat we forget another very important aspect of a healthy life: When should we eat the biggest meals of the day?

And be careful, this is an aspect much more important than we could initially intuit. According to a Howard Hughes Medical Institute study led by molecular biologist Joseph Takahashi of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the calorie restriction combined with time-restricted eating substantially increased longevity of the hundreds of mice that participated in the experiment.

Takahashi's team's four-year study concluded that the hypocaloric diet alone had prolonged the lives of animals in 10%. But feeding the mice the diet only at night, when the mice were most active, managed to prolong his life in -no more and no less than- 35%. We are talking about this combination of little food and at the right time, he added. nine months plus half-life two-year-old rats.

Rafael de Cabo, a gerontology researcher at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, says the Science article “is a very elegant demonstration that even if you restrict calories, if you don't eat in suitable hoursyou don’t get the full benefits of calorie restriction.”

This is just one of the studies that reached a similar conclusion. On other occasions, it has also been shown that controlling eating times can be a very powerful tool to combat Type 2 diabetesto the heart diseases and the obesity. Another study, this time from Harvard and Murcia Universities and published by the International Journal of Obesity, came to the conclusion that eat after hours has an effect on the biological clock and promotes health problems, including obesity. In other words, if we want to maintain a healthy lifestyle, we must pay special attention to this issue.

What are the best times to eat?

Constance Brown-Riggs, spokesperson for the American Academy of Nutritionists and Dietitians, explained in an article published by Business Insider that the best time to have breakfast It is an hour after we get up from the bed. Of course, it would be convenient to make a nuance. Because another investigation from Tel Aviv University found that the body metabolizes the first meal of the day better as long as it occurs before 9:30 am. If we wake up later, it is better not to have breakfast until lunch time.

In the joint investigation by Harvard University and the University of Murcia that we have already mentioned, it was also concluded that the ideal time to eat its between 12:30pm and 1:30pm In this study, they also explained that eating after 3pm made weight loss significantly more difficult.

As for dinner time, the ideal time is decided based on the time the person goes to sleep. The healthiest thing is for this last meal of the day to be consumed three hours before going to bed, with the end of facilitate the digestive process. So, if we have the habit of sleeping at 9pm, for example, we should have dinner -ideally- at 6pm.