24
&
November 2015 | Read this issue and more at www.healthandwellnessmagazine.net |
Most People Don’t
Eat Three Square
Meals A Day
Grazing is the
predominant pattern
By Angela S. Hoover, Staff Writer
The notion that people eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and maybe a
snack or two is not accurate. This is
according to a new study that used a
Smartphone app to track every bite
people eat.
So how does the average person
eat? Most people are grazers. Rather
than eating three or four times during the day, they snack all the time.
In addition, they are also eating
very random items and random
combinations of items, according
to study researcher Sarchidananda
Panda, an obesity researcher at the
Salk Institute’s Regulatory Biology
Laboratory in California.
All-day eaters are doing so during
a significant period of their waking
hours. The average time between the
first bite in the morning and the last
bite in the evening was found to be
14 hours and 45 minutes. Convincing
people to limit their food consumption to a smaller window of time
could help improve weight and health
issues, the researchers say. The team
previously studied animal eating
patterns and found lab animals who
had access to food for only eight to
12 hours were leaner with healthier
cholesterol levels and healthier heart
and liver function than animals
allowed to eat whenever they liked
ARE YOU IN NEED OF A
MAMMOGRAM?
WOULD YOU LIKE A TAKE-HOME
COLON CANCER SCREENING KIT?
HAVE YOU RECENTLY BEEN
DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER?
around the clock. Other researchers
claimed these animal-eating findings
probably wouldn’t apply to humans
because people eat three meals within
a time period of less than 12 hours.
However, this new study shows
that’s not so. Limiting eating
to fewer hours is a
simple and
powerful
weightgain
intervention for
people who
are eating nearly 15
hours a day.
Most food consumption studies rely on food diary reports from
participants. However, people don’t
always record every morsel faithfully. To combat this reporting error
for this latest study, Panda and his
team developed a Smartphone app
that works like Snapchat for food.
The 156 people in the study were
instructed to photograph everything
they ate or drank before consuming
it. It is estimated participants forgot
to snap these photos only 10 percent
of the time.
The photos revealed no standard
pattern of breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Instead, people had “eating events”
that were anything from a snack to
a full meal. These ranged in number
from three to 10 daily, on average.
The participants consumed less than
25 percent of their daily calories
before noon and 37.5 percent of their
calories after 6 p.m. About 12.2 percent of their calories were consumed
after 9 p.m. Less than 10 percent of
people restricted their eating to a
12-hour window or less. People also
ate too much. On average, the participants consumed 1,947 calories per
day. This is about 23 percent more
calories than the estimated average
amount they needed to maintain their
weight.
Additionally, the researchers asked
eight overweight but otherwise
healthy respondents to participate in
another usage of the app. This group
was told to pick a 10- to 12-hour
stretch of day and restrict their entire
caloric intake to just that stretch of
time. They were also told to keep the
stretch consistent seven days a week.
After 16 weeks, the participants lost
an average of 7.2 pounds and report-
Like us
@healthykentucky
ed they were sleeping better and had
more energy. An analysis of their
diets found they had reduced their
caloric intake by about 20 percent.
One reason for this calorie cutting
may have been that people tend to
stick to certain consumption p ] \