Summary: Utilizing mealtime strategies, such as intermittent fasting or early eating, can help improve fat burning and reduce appetite. Those who practice early eating restricted feeding strategies had lower levels of ghrelin and improved fat burning.
Source: The Obesity Society
Researchers have discovered that meal timing strategies such as intermittent fasting or eating earlier in the daytime appear to help people lose weight by lowering appetite rather than burning more calories, according to a report published online today in the journal Obesity. The study is the first to show how meal timing affects 24-hour energy metabolism when food intake and meal frequency are matched.
“Coordinating meals with circadian rhythms, or your body’s internal clock, may be a powerful strategy for reducing appetite and improving metabolic health,” said Eric Ravussin, PhD, one of the study’s authors and associate executive director for clinical science at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge.
“We suspect that a majority of people may find meal timing strategies helpful for losing weight or to maintain their weight since these strategies naturally appear to curb appetite, which may help people eat less,” said Courtney M. Peterson, PhD, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Peterson and her colleagues also report that meal timing strategies may help people burn more fat on average during a 24-hour period. Early Time-Restricted Feeding (eTRF)–a form of daily intermittent fasting where dinner is eaten in the afternoon–helped to improve people’s ability to switch between burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat for energy, an aspect of metabolism known as metabolic flexibility. The study’s authors said, however, that the results on fat-burning are preliminary. “Whether these strategies help people lose body fat need to be tested and confirmed in a much longer study,” said Peterson.
For the study, researchers enrolled 11 adult men and women who had excess weight. Participants were recruited between November 2014 and August 2016. Adults, in general good health, aged 20-to-45-years old were eligible to participate if they had a body mass index between 25 and 35 kg/m2 (inclusive), body weight between 68 and 100 kg, a regular bedtime between 9:30 p.m. and 12 a.m., and for women, a regular menstrual cycle.
Participants tried two different meal timing strategies in random order: a control schedule where participants ate three meals during a 12-hour period with breakfast at 8:00 a.m. and dinner at 8:00 p.m. and an eTRF schedule where participants ate three meals over a six-hour period with breakfast at 8:00 a.m. and dinner at 2:00 p.m. The same amounts and types of foods were consumed on both schedules. Fasting periods for the control schedule included 12 hours per day, while the eTRF schedule involved fasting for 18 hours per day.
Study participants followed the different schedules for four days in a row. On the fourth day, researchers measured the metabolism of participants by placing them in a respiratory chamber–a room-like device–where researchers measured how many calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein were burned. Researchers also measured the appetite levels of participants every three hours while they were awake, as well as hunger hormones in the morning and evening.
Although eTRF did not significantly affect how many calories participants burned, the researchers found that eTRF did lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and improved some aspects of appetite. It also increased fat-burning over the 24-hour day.
“By testing eTRF, we were able to kill two birds with one stone,” said Peterson, adding that the researchers were able to gain some insight into daily intermittent fasting (time restricted-feeding), as well as meal timing strategies that involve eating earlier in the daytime to be in sync with circadian rhythms. The researchers believe that these two broader classes of meal timing strategies may have similar benefits to eTRF.
Hollie Raynor, PhD, RD, LDN, who was not associated with the research, said: “this study helps provide more information about how patterns of eating, and not just what you eat, may be important for achieving a healthy weight.” Raynor is a professor and interim dean of research in the Department of Nutrition, College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Peterson and colleagues said prior research was conflicted on whether meal timing strategies help with weight loss by helping people burn more calories or by lowering appetite. Studies in rodents suggest such strategies burn more calories, but data from human studies were conflicting–some studies suggested meal timing strategies increase calories burned, but other reports showed no difference. The study’s authors said, however, that previous studies did not directly measure how many calories people burned or were imperfect in other ways.
Other study authors include: Daniel S. Hsia, and Robbie A. Beyl of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. Eleonora Poggiogalle of Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, also co-authored the study.
Funding: This work was supported by an Early Career Research Grant from The Obesity Society, two career development grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (KL2TR001419) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (U54GM104940), which support the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center; Nutrition Obesity Research Center grant P30DK072476 titled “Nutrition and Metabolic Health Through the Lifespan.”
Source:
The Obesity Society
Media Contacts:
Kristin Collins – The Obesity Society
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open access
“Early Time‐Restricted Feeding Reduces Appetite and Increases Fat Oxidation But Does Not Affect Energy Expenditure in Humans”. Eric Ravussin, Robbie A. Beyl, Eleonora Poggiogalle, Daniel S. Hsia, Courtney M. Peterson.
Obesity. doi:10.1002/oby.22518
Abstract
Early Time‐Restricted Feeding Reduces Appetite and Increases Fat Oxidation But Does Not Affect Energy Expenditure in Humans
Objective
Eating earlier in the daytime to align with circadian rhythms in metabolism enhances weight loss. However, it is unknown whether these benefits are mediated through increased energy expenditure or decreased food intake. Therefore, this study performed the first randomized trial to determine how meal timing affects 24‐hour energy metabolism when food intake and meal frequency are matched.
Methods
Eleven adults with overweight practiced both early time‐restricted feeding (eTRF) (eating from 8 am to 2 pm) and a control schedule (eating from 8 am to 8 pm) for 4 days each. On the fourth day, 24‐hour energy expenditure and substrate oxidation were measured by whole‐room indirect calorimetry, in conjunction with appetite and metabolic hormones.
Results
eTRF did not affect 24‐hour energy expenditure (Δ = 10 ± 16 kcal/d; P = 0.55). Despite the longer daily fast (intermittent fasting), eTRF decreased mean ghrelin levels by 32 ± 10 pg/mL (P = 0.006), made hunger more even‐keeled (P = 0.006), and tended to increase fullness (P = 0.06‐0.10) and decrease the desire to eat (P = 0.08). eTRF also increased metabolic flexibility (P = 0.0006) and decreased the 24‐hour nonprotein respiratory quotient (Δ = −0.021 ± 0.010; P = 0.05).
Conclusions
Meal‐timing interventions facilitate weight loss primarily by decreasing appetite rather than by increasing energy expenditure. eTRF may also increase fat loss by increasing fat oxidation.
