More than 2 billion of the world's population is overweight or obese, with consequences, in the long run, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. A help to counteract excessive gain of body weight may be the time we sit at the table in the evening to eat the dinner. This is the result of a small study published a few days ago in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism by a team of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA (Gu et al, Jun 2020).
20 volunteers, 10 men and 10 women, were divided into two groups. The first group was asked to have dinner at 6 pm. The second group, instead, to have dinner at 10 pm. Dinner was the same for both groups. Then, all the participants had to go to bed at 11 pm in the evening. Scientists monitored the volunteers, by analyzing their blood sugar, by scanning their body fat and by tracking their sleep activity and quality. What emerged was that, for the same number of calories ingested, in the group that had eaten at 10 pm the blood glucose values ??were higher, on average by 18%, and the amount of fat burned lower, on average by 10%. These values ??refer to healthy adults that are not overweight, for this reason, the researchers think that in overweight or obese people, whose metabolism is already altered, these imbalances are bigger.
Therefore, eating late in the evening changes the nighttime metabolism and this, in the long run, could cause or aggravate obesity.
