Putting more hours between dinner and breakfast may stave off obesity, at least in mice. This according to biologist Satchin Panda, and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. His team studied mice on high-fat diets. One group was allowed to eat freely at all times, and became obese and unhealthy. But another group, which ate the same number of daily calories as the first group—but within a strict eight-hour window—fared better. Surprisingly, the mice that were eating the same number of calories, but ate only for eight hours, did not become as obese as the first group. Less than 12 percent of their body weight was fat, as opposed to 40 percent. That group’s cholesterol, blood sugar, and liver function were all nearly normal as well. Panda says that modern society’s late-night dining and snacking may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. . Researchers gave some of the time-restricted mice a respite on weekends, allowing them free access to high-fat meals for these two days. These mice had less fat mass and gained less weight than the mice given a freely available, high-fat diet the whole time. In fact, the mice that were freely fed just on weekends looked much the same as mice given access to food 9 or 12 hours a day for seven days a week, suggesting that the diet can withstand some temporary interruptions. “The fact that it worked no matter what the diet, and the fact that it worked over the weekend and weekdays, was a very nice surprise,” says the study’s first author Amandine Chaix, a postdoctoral researcher in Panda’s lab.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 19:00:59 +0000
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