The Benefits Of Eating Less Often

It turns out that the difference between being fat and not being fat is not just about what you eat, it’s about when you eat, as in how often you eat. The Salk Institute for Biological Science reports that researchers there have learned that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The scientists fed two sets of mice a diet comprising 60 percent of its calories from fat (like eating potato chips and ice-cream for all your meals). One group of mice could eat whenever they wanted, and the other group was restricted to eating for only eight hours every night–fasting for about 16 hours a day. Two control groups ate a standard diet with about 13 percent of calories from fat. What did they find? After 100 days, the mice who ate fatty food frequently throughout the day gained weight and developed high cholesterol, high blood glucose, liver damage and diminished motor control, while the mice in the time-restricted feeding group weighed 28 percent less and showed no adverse health effects despite consuming the same amount of calories from the same fatty food. Wait, there’s more: the time-restricted mice outperformed the ad lib eaters and those on a normal diet when given an exercise test. Read more from the Salk Institute.