
No link between eating dinner after 8pm, obesity in children - devinp
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/1841.html
======
jelliclesfarm
It's probably a cultural thing. In India...We ate after 8 all the time. 6.00
is when you get the last installment of caffeine..as tea or coffee. But then
again, we were not allowed to come back home until after sunset. Play outside
till sunset, homework time afterward, dinner and then a little walk/tv time
and then off to bed. Elsewhere...Asian outdoor markets thrive until midnight.
In my suburban town in America, everything is dead by 8. It's a tad depressing
actually.

~~~
Mikeb85
I think it's weather related. In most countries that have late night outdoor
markets, temperatures are unbearably hot during the day, and comfortably warm
at night.

In much of North America, half the year is only tolerably warm during the day.

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juancn
Duh! A large chunk of the world eats dinner after 9pm and obesity rates are
lower or the same than other countries.

~~~
erelde
Spain and the south of France comes to mind as examples.

~~~
nocomments
Personally, when i arrived in the usa 8 years ago i was surprised that people
eat dinner at 5:00 pm. In India,where i am from this time was meant for some
light snacks and coffee/tea. So you get some light food to fuel you till you
have dinner much later.

It's more of a cultural thing and no single thing is good or bad.

~~~
differentView
Are these people without jobs that eat dinner at 5pm? Most people I know are
still at work at 5pm.

~~~
smelendez
Many people seem to snack in the office around 5.

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Mc_Big_G
Why is it so hard for us to accept that obesity is due to overeating? Also,
the myth that exercise is the key to losing weight won't die.

~~~
smhost
I have a friend who eats 3000~4000 kcals with no exercise and he is as thin as
a stick. I have another friend who is a complete couch potato and eats junk
food all day with no exercise, and he looks like a gym rat.

I think a lot of the magical thinking surrounding weight loss is because
there's no one-size-fits-all solution, so people make up patterns in their
heads and believe them to be true.

~~~
Peradine
Basic thermodynamics:

If inputs > outputs, there is net energy storage (as fat or protein)

If inputs < outputs, there is net energy deficit (lost from fat and protein)

Inputs = food and drink consumed

Outputs = Basal metabolic rate (BMR) + energy used for activity + energy lost
in urine and faeces

Faeces caloric content varies between 50-350 kcal / day, urine 91–117 kcal /
day [1]

Basal metabolic rate is primarily decided by fat-free mass, mass, and age, 26%
of BMR is not defined by these parameters. Mean BMR is 1500 kcal/day, and 26%
of this represents a variability of 1305-1695 kcal per day.[2]

(350-50) + (117-91) + (1695-1305) = 716 kcal

Therefore two people of identical age, fat-free mass and mass who consume
identical caloric intake and perform identical exercise will have, at most, a
variance of 716 kcal / day in their energy expenditure from the variance in
urinary and faecal caloric loss and BMR

[1]: Rose C, Parker A, Jefferson B, Cartmell E. The Characterization of Feces
and Urine: A Review of the Literature to Inform Advanced Treatment Technology.
Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology.
2015;45(17):1827-1879. doi:10.1080/10643389.2014.1000761. Section 3.2.5 and
Section 3.6.4

[2] Factors influencing variation in basal metabolic rate include fat-free
mass, fat mass, age, and circulating thyroxine but not sex, circulating
leptin, or triiodothyronine. Johnstone AM, Murison SD, Duncan JS, Rance KA,
Speakman JR. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Nov;82(5):941-8.

~~~
lukeschlather
Assuming that 9kcal of fat = 1g, that's about 80g of extra fat stored/lost per
day. Over the course of the year, that's 3 kg, or about 6.5 pounds.

That kind of variance is enough to mean that if we trust the study, you could
raise two different twenty-year-olds and one will die of starvation and the
other will be clinically obese despite the same routine and diet.

~~~
bluecalm
It's not true. Even if they start with very different calorie needs for the
same lifestyle that will even out once their weight changes. The more you
weigh the more calories you need and the less you weigh the less you need.
That's where the myth of metabolism slowing down after weight loss comes from
btw: you just need less calories after some time of dieting so your progress
will slow down or steak stall if you don't adjust.

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AznHisoka
it may not lead to weight gain but is still healthy to eat late dinners?

If you have chronic acid reflux (GERD), eating late makes it worse (acid comes
back up when you lie down after a meal)

Eating late can also lead to worse sleep as your body is spending energy
digesting food rather than repairing itself.

Personally I feel much more refreshed the next day, when dinner is around 6pm
and when it is the lightest meal of the day. Practical issues aside, i cant
think of any health benefits eating a late dinner.

~~~
watwut
Obviously, if you feel bad after late dinner, it is healthier to eat sooner.
That does not mean healthy people needs to follow the same restrictions.

FOr many of us, late dinner does not cause problems.

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danneu
Finally, an article to link to my girlfriend when she finds me eating ice
cream at 3am. It's a stretch, but I'm easily convinced after 8pm.

~~~
flexie
Surely you're not a child, Danneu.

~~~
penagwin
He said it was a stretch :P

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mrcnkoba
There obviously is a link between the span of eating and your weight. But it's
not as big, when you eat large quantities of food.

If we are talking about obesity it means that it took years to put someone in
that state. Eating 300-500 of unhealthy kcal less, by decreasing the eating
span just delays the problem.

I do agree though, that the shorter eating span the better. It's called
intermittent fasting and there are promising results coming out from research
on that.

------
giarc
There was a paper published recently (within last year or two) that looked at
the time between first meal and last meal of the day in mice. In general, they
found that the shorter time between first and last meal had a significant
correlation on weight loss. For example if the time between breakfast and
dinner was 10 hours instead of 14 hours, the 10 hour mice weighed less than
the 14 hour mice, even on the same diet.

I can't find the citation right now but if I do I will edit the comment.

~~~
ouid
I'm commenting to express interest in that citation, and will go looking for
it myself if you don't find it.

If I had to bullshit a mechanism, I would say that, for well fed mice,
activity increases with the amount of time since the last meal, so mice on the
early dinner diet would be more active in the mornings before breakfast.

To test this, I would see if I could get the effect to go away by feeding mice
as soon as they woke up, and then 10 or 14 hours later.

~~~
giarc
[http://www.cell.com/cell-
metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2814...](http://www.cell.com/cell-
metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2814%2900498-7)

I think this is it. It even includes a nice Graphical Abstract which is kind
of comical.

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hourislate
My opinion is the amount of time spent eating (and not when you eat) is a
major contributor to lower obesity rates. When you spend more time chewing and
conversing, you seem to eat less and get fuller. Typically you can't even
finish your meal.

In NA we eat to quickly not giving our brain and stomach time to send the
proper signals of fullness. Try it sometime, take a typically portion and
spend 20 minutes not eating more than half of it. You probably won't be able
to finish it.

~~~
matwood
And they are all tricks to eat less.

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angry_octet
"The lead author of the study, Dr Gerda Pot, is a Visiting Lecturer in the
Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division and is also based at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam. She said: ‘The findings of our study are surprising.
We expected to find an association between eating later and being more likely
to be overweight but actually found that this was not the case. This may be
due to the limited number of children consuming their evening meal after 8pm
in this cohort."

So the study is far too small to have the power to come to _surprising_
conclusions, and should probably be retracted.

Also, Science Bulletin has very annoying popovers that will drive the audience
away.

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jjawssd
When do you eat dinner?

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------
balladeer
So the last time I had put on weight (an accident -> was bedridden for long) I
decided to fix my food intake along with running and sports. One advice I
received from a dietician was that have dinner at least 2 hours before you go
to bed and I followed it. I don't know whether it was other things that worked
too or only others worked but I felt a clear difference in my fitness, sleep
pattern ("very" uninterrupted), digestion, and mood when I woke up the next
morning.

On a side note, when I was S Korea - dinner happened at 5pm and I could never
get used to it :-)

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sandworm101
When else are they going to eat?

I was once a serios competative swimmer (think top 100 in the US). If i ate
between school at say 4pm and training at 5, that dinner would have been
floating down the lanes. After 8pm was the only option. (Same for breakfast.
Eat after training, on way to school.) Properly active kids eat when they can.
Nobody should skip exercise or other activity for the sake of some silly 1950s
eating schedual.

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lloydde
I was a small kid and my kids are small. I've always found late dining to be
uncomfortable as I'm too hungry. Thankfully, it isn't cultural in the areas of
Canada and USA where I've lived.

Does anyone have any experience where adopting later dining improved happiness
or health? What changes did you make? How did you adopt it?

~~~
watwut
Assuming late dinning is sinning after 20:00, we adopted it in the summer. It
definitely improved hapiness, because we did not had to watch the time and
could leave playground when we felt like leaving it. (Our playground even had
wifi for parental hapiness. Kids were happy to be with friends.) It is safe to
assume the health got better too, because we had more sun and kids had more
exercise.

We adopted it by not feeling like leaving and taking food with us.

~~~
lloydde
I like that. The kids want to snack after school anyway, so a later dinner as
the weather gets nicer makes a lot of sense. The tricky part might be keeping
bedtime reasonable as my kids are still young.

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ZanyProgrammer
I'm curious-everyone who is doing the contrarian "But I never eat before
8pm/whatever"-where do you live? Also its a bit of a straw man to make 5pm
your early eating time-I usually eat between 6 and 7-is that abnormally early?
I also tend to get to work earlier and leave earlier as well.

~~~
Oletros
I live in Spain and we have dinner at 20:00, almost all my friends and family
have dinner between 21:00 and 22:00.

My Italian family have dinner at 19:00

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nocomments
meh.. in asian countries its a norm to have late dinner and go to bed after
that. Doesn't make the kids fat.

~~~
igor_filippov
Is this an anecdotic evidence?

~~~
EpicEng
It may not be the entire picture, but certainly we have obesity stats for
millions of children in Asia.

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blowski
Perhaps there's a spurious link - the kinds of families who eat after 9pm are
also the kinds of families who eat too much.

Maybe. I have zero evidence, not even a circumstantial anecdote. But perhaps
that's where theories like this come from.

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dxbydt
The article cites major caveats - 1\. Cohort size of children eating after 8pm
is much smaller than before - mostly because the kids are in bed by then (
they are looking at 4-10 year olds ) 2\. Self reported Food Diaries are seldom
accurate. 3\. This study is the first of it's kind.

Supper timing is majorly correlated to weight gain, especially if most of the
calories are from carbs. Simple rules like NCA5 or NCA6 ( no carbs after 5pm )
easily influence weight loss in teens & adults. I wouldn't try this hack with
4-10 year olds, but once you are in the teens, it is a nice simple body hack.

~~~
conistonwater
You first say "Self reported Food Diaries are seldom accurate" and "This study
is the first of it's kind", but you then say "Supper timing is majorly
correlated to weight gain". How do you know that? Isn't there a slight
contradiction there? If it was correlated, you would then expect an experiment
like this to find it.

~~~
dxbydt
You have a point.

Details - I build weight nodels related to food dairies. I have a few dozen
redditors ( mostly from the loseit subreddit ) who have signed up. They send
me their food dairy and weight everyday via the free WeightGreat.com service,
and I then build models.

From the data I have looked at, I can say supper timing is correlated to
weight gain. Moreover if the supper is sourced from mostly carbs (
sugar/starch, not fiber ), weight gain is statistically significant.

~~~
conistonwater
I think that makes your evidence significantly weaker than what was used in
this study.

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Reedx
Obesity isn't about _when_ you eat, it's about _what_ you eat and how much.

~~~
ouid
How much you eat might have been related to when you eat. No one here is
seriously advocating that energy is not conserved.

------
foxfired
I think the problem is not really about eating late, but more of eating a
large meal and going to bed right away.

I don't know about it making you gain weight, but I know I wake up tired and
my heart rate tracker shows it being much higher then usual.

~~~
iopq
Still not a problem. Whatever makes you eat the least will let you control
your weight. For some people, it might be not eating before bed, for others it
may not matter.

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soufron
Who eats before 8pm ?!? O_o

What kind of country are they talking about?

~~~
ashark
Young kids need ~11-12 hrs of sleep a night. They have to get up at about
7:00AM (because WE have to get up then) so bedtime is fixed at 7ish. Bedtime
routine takes 30-45 minutes. We don't want to have a separate dinner for the
kids. Plus we need kid-free time to keep the house in something resembling
order. So _of course_ we have early (~5:30) dinner.

How do families in 7:00-9:00 dinner start time countries handle this?

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niels_olson
Unfortunately, some people are going to read this wrong. For example: I know
some folks who have "second dinner" after 8 pm. Their children are
definitively obese, and I can see them citing this study as a reason to keep
eating "a meal called dinner" after 8 pm.

------
amelius
Some people are advocating to have the largest meal in the morning, then a
medium meal in the afternoon, and a light meal in the evening. (I could not
find a good reference, it's something I've encountered several times in
blogs).

Anyone here following such a regime, and does it work in controlling weight
and feeling healthy?

~~~
dpark
Some people advocate intermittent fasting. Some people advocate skipping
lunch. Some people advocate advocate nearly any strategy you can imagine. The
only thing that really matters is whether you eat less. Any strategy that
helps you eat less will result in weight loss/control.

~~~
brandall10
"The only thing that really matters is whether you eat less."

Intermittent fasting != calorie restriction - you can eat the same amount. The
benefits are from entering a fat burning/low insulin state that occurs by
going > 12 hours without food.

~~~
matwood
> Intermittent fasting != calorie restriction - you can eat the same amount.

But most people will not. To keep numbers simple lets say I eat 2kcals/day.
Now I decide to intermittent fast and only eat every other day. On the days I
do eat, I will have a really hard time pushing down 4k cals unless I plan to
make them up (when I used to bulk eating became a chore). Also, since I'm
already doing IF, I'm probably a bit health conscious and likely eat pretty
health on the days I do eat making it even harder to make up the missed
calories.

Over the course of a week and month those cals missed on the IF days but not
fully made up on the eat days do add up which leads to weight loss.

~~~
amelius
That doesn't prove that "The only thing that really matters is whether you eat
less" is correct.

~~~
dpark
Find the studies that show weight loss when eating in a caloric surplus while
intermittent fasting.

------
EGreg
Obesity isn't the only thing though. Skipping dinner or breakfast is a form of
intermittent fasting.

I think intermittent fasting improves lifespan. It is a form of calorie
restriction. People I know even do water diets to repair bones - but that may
be a bit extreme.

However, this is probably not good for children. Their bodies need to grow.
What we really need is to feed them healthy food instead of the processed crap
found now in many stores. The explosion of sugars and HFCS in everything
probably contributes to the diabetes / weight problems for kids today.

~~~
reese_john
IIRC the only studies that show that calorie restriction improves lifespan are
done in animals, so you can't really extend this to humans.

~~~
EGreg
Humans are biologically so different from animals? Most such studies are done
in animals first. Human trials take much longer.

Here is a much more recent study with monkeys:

[http://news.wisc.edu/monkey-caloric-restriction-study-
shows-...](http://news.wisc.edu/monkey-caloric-restriction-study-shows-big-
benefit-contradicts-earlier-study/)

~~~
nocomments
so you can correlate success with trial animals to success with humans. eh ? i
know its hackernews but i see a lot of people preaching about their favorite
hacky fad food habits.How about asking people to live a normal healthy
lifestyle. Few hours of exercise and normal food that your body can sustain.

~~~
EGreg
Well unless you can tell me what makes humans so different from monkeys that
you think it won't work.

~~~
dpark
Lots of interventions that work in animal models do not work in humans.
Physiology is different as is adherence. Humans control their own diets, so a
really difficult diet will simply result in no humans sticking with it.

Humans aren't even monkeys. So it's not surprising that "works in monkeys" is
a mediocre proxy for "works in humans".

~~~
EGreg
Well then here is human trials:

In a pilot human trial, three cycles of a similar diet given to 19 subjects
once a month for five days decreased risk factors and biomarkers for aging,
diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer with no major adverse side
effects, according to Longo.

BOOM.

~~~
dpark
Like many intermittent fasting proponents, you look at these studies that
enforce days of significantly-reduced caloric intake and assume that a
positive result there transfers to "skipping dinner or breakfast" just because
both are referred to as "intermittent fasting". Even if 5 days of significant
caloric restriction extends lifespan, that in no way indicates that 14-16 hour
fasting does.

Also, I never said that intermittent fasting was ineffective in humans. I said
that animal models do not always map well to humans. Scientists who use animal
models understand their shortcomings. You should do some basic research before
throwing up your arrogant "boom" as if you proved something.

~~~
EGreg
Why don't you look at the actual article?

~~~
dpark
Which article, the one about eating after 8pm having no relation to obesity in
children that has pretty much nothing to do with intermittent fasting? Yeah, I
read that one.

Or the one you randomly quoted but didn't even bother to provide a link to?
The one that did a pilot study in humans specifically because the researchers
know that animal studies don't always map well to humans? The one that did a 5
day fast rather than just skipping breakfast? I read that one, too.

