What Time Is It Best To Eat Each Food?

Foods rich in carbohydrates are better not to eat at night, fruit before six in the afternoon, when we get up we have to have a good breakfast … how many of you have heard or pronounced any of those phrases? Everybody. Because lots of myths circulate about the specific hours at which this or that food should or should not be eaten, or the amount of it.

Many of them surely seem logical to us and we will have a perfectly rational argument prepared, such as “you have to have a good breakfast because breakfast is the most important meal of the day” or “no pasta at night, because we are not going to waste that energy and we will get fat ”, right?

These blunt statements about an hour and a specific food are often myths with little scientific basis to support them. But wait! Circadian rhythms exist! There will be some truth in all this …

How Circadian Rhythms Affect Us When Eating

Indeed, our body has physiological variations in its regulation related to the time of day, and that is what we know as “circadian rhythms”. There are more active hormones in the morning than at night, and vice versa.

Sunlight has a lot to do with regulating these cycles and therefore metabolism, it changes our body temperature, our blood pressure, and changes the secretion of hormones and the behavior of our digestive system.

These oscillations can influence how we metabolize certain nutrients, but it will never be such a remarkable difference that it really changes the value of our diet for better or worse, it is a mistake to give it an absolute value. That does not mean that we cannot try to set ourselves “on time” with our watches.

Our “central clock” is located in the hypothalamus and is the one who sets the rhythms of the rest of the “secondary clocks” that regulate the different organs and metabolic aspects.

Also the adipose tissue has “clocks”, and of course, the intestine that is more active during the day and is more effective absorbing nutrients, than at night.

In a context where we get up at dawn and go to bed when the sun goes down, as was the case in the past, we would be very well adapted to those circadian rhythms. But that is not the case at all today, we stay awake several hours after dark, thanks to electric light, even working or in front of screens that emit light, especially in winter when it gets dark before seven o’clock. late (and let’s not talk in other latitudes), we also have blinds that allow us to continue sleeping in the dark if we wish (or if we can afford it …) even though it has been dawn hours, or on the contrary there are times of the year in which If we get up early, it may still be night when we have to get out of bed.

Our life is not adapted to the daily cycle of sunlight and therefore our intakes neither.

This is aggravated in the case of people who work shifts, or always night shift. They increase their risk of suffering from various ailments, also digestive ones, and they also tend to have a higher risk of obesity. Recent studies also link the alterations of these cycles with the development of cancer.

How to adapt to circadian rhythms

The first thing is to know our daily activity pattern. If we have a regular routine, we always wake up at the same time, eat at the same time, do sports at the same time and have a sleep cycle with few alterations, it will be much easier than if we have a more chaotic life, with many trips , variable schedules depending on the day or work shifts that force us to change the sleep cycle.

An easy recommendation would be to “try to eat more during the day than at night. ” However, in Spain that we are of late and copious dinners, this can be a utopia. In this matter, the early dinners of the Anglo-Saxon countries would be better adapted to the circadian rhythms than ours.

Having dinner before and going to bed before seems like good advice, but is it realistic with our lifestyle? If you leave work at eight and get home at nine, then not too long. Not to mention hospitality workers, stores that close at ten at night or night workers. Only those lucky enough to work morning shifts, or leave early in the afternoon, might consider changing that routine.

Of course, the rest that we can save are those two hours of television that we watch especially at night according to the surveys, and go to bed sooner, also bringing the time to wake up earlier.

Night or shift workers

If we belong to the group of night workers or changing shifts, or we often travel between different time zones, there is good news: our meal times can influence the regulation of internal clocks.

According to a study by the British University of Surrey, by delaying meals for 5 hours in a group of volunteers, their plasma values ​​of glucose and other substances were readjusted to the new schedule. That is, although the “central clock” follows its own, peripheral clocks can adapt to changes. As long as they are not daily and we maintain the pattern of temporal distance between meals more or less constant.

But beware, if our diet consists of unhealthy foods, it will not improve because we eat them at certain times. Although there are studies that link circadian rhythms with weight loss, we cannot even remotely say that they are a determining factor in it, or not even one with a lot of weight, worth the redundancy.

Choosing foods well and that they are healthy is always the first step towards a better diet. And then come the rest of the nuances.