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 Researchers asked volunteers to use a mobile app to snap pictures of
everything they ate and drank over three weeks. Most participants
consumed food and drinks over about 15 hours of the day, taking in
less than 25 percent of their calories before noon and more than 35
percent after 6 p.m.
“Most people think they eat three meals and a snack or two within a
10-12 hour window, but we found the majority spread their caloric
intake over a very long time,” said study co-author Satchidananda
Panda of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla,
California.
The trouble with eating or drinking over a longer stretch of waking
hours and consuming more calories at night is that “it confuses our
body’s biological clock and predisposes us to obesity, diabetes,
fatty liver disease, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease,”
Panda added by email.
Because many existing apps and food diaries can encourage people to
eat less just by seeing what they record, Panda and co-author
Shubhroz Gill at the Salk Institute devised an app that would erase
data as soon as images were logged. This meant the app should have
minimal impact on how people ate, Panda said.
Based on an analysis of snapshots recorded by more than 150
volunteers, the researchers got a sense of what people ate when, and
under what circumstances.
They could see, for example, what people photographed next to a
keyboard, in bed, watching television, or walking down the street.
Pictures also told a story about what people tended to favor at
particular times of day. Coffee was more common in the morning,
while alcohol was more likely to appear at night. People drank tea
throughout the day, and images of chocolate and candy made regular
appearances from about 10 a.m. onward, the study found.
The researchers also tested whether the app might help people eat
less by encouraging them to consume food and drink over a shorter
stretch of the day.
They asked eight overweight people who tended to eat over more than
14 hours of the day to cut back to 10 to 11 hours. After 16 weeks,
these people lost about 3.5 percent of their excess body weight and
reported sleeping better.
One drawback of the study is that it’s too small to draw any broad
conclusions about whether eating over fewer hours during the day
might lead to weight loss, or whether sleeping more causes less food
consumption, the authors acknowledge in Cell Metabolism.
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While the study also isn’t designed to prove whether mobile apps or
other forms of food tracking can help with weight loss, the findings
build on a large body of research linking self-monitoring of dietary
habits to weight loss, said Elina Helander, a researcher at Tampere
University of Technology in Finland.
“Smartphones can make self-monitoring easy compared to paper
diaries,” Helander, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
Mobile apps may also provide more real-time reminders in reaction to
pictures or data supplied by dieters, though these tools still rely
on people to motivate themselves to interact with the technology,
said Frank Scheer, a sleep researcher at Harvard University and
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Previous research has found that consuming those first calories
earlier in the day may predict greater success with weight loss,
Scheer, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
“The current study further suggests that extending the overnight
fasting duration in overweight individuals with a habitually short
overnight fasting duration leads to weight loss, at least in part
due to reduced daily caloric intake,” Scheer said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1gQU1tF Cell Metabolism, published online
September 24, 2015.
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