MrRippedZilla
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Debunking broscience: eating most of your calories/carbs late at night makes you fat
A common belief, completely lacking in logical thinking, is that you should avoid eating most of your cals/carbs in the evening because it can cause fat gain, make you unhealthy, etc. This is bullshit. As we'll see, not only is there nothing to support this but also quite a bit showing the complete opposite.
The majority of studies with matched calories have actually found that eating later is superior for body comp & health and yet this piece of broscience is alive and well (I know members of this very board who believe it). So, time to kill it off completely. Well, hopefully anyway.
Origin
The late night eating myth may have originated from observational studies that consistently find a positive relationship between calories consumed in the evening and high bf% in the genera population. So it's the classic mistake of assuming correlation = causation when it very much does not. Those same studies show that the general population consumes too many calories overall, the real cause of the problem, so to blame it on the distribution is plain stupid.
The same positive relationship is found in other observational research showing that people who skip breakfast, eat late at night, etc are fatter than those who eat breakfast, have regular meals, eat less in the evening, etc. Again, this has nothing to do with the caloric distribution. Those same studies illustrate that these folks who skip breakfast, lunch, etc have unhealthy behavioral patterns in general:
"Late night eating is not only correlated to a higher calorie intake, but also less sleep time and more sedentary activities, i.e. watching TV and more time spent in front of the computer, which are additional confounders that can predispose people to weight gain."
The point I'm trying to make here is that observational data isn't telling us that eating later in the day = weight gain. It's telling us that an overall unhealthy lifestyle = weight gain. Controlled studies in general do not show larger evening meals negatively impacting body comp compared to eating earlier in the day but, before I get into that, 2 population groups that need to be discussed.
Shift workers
You will find studies claiming that late night eating is bad for shift workers. The problem here is that these studies are uncontrolled (re calories) and confounded by the fact that shift work itself has an independent negative effect on metabolic health.
Shift-workers are predisposed to a bunch of problems including obesity, cardiovascular disease and gastrointestinal issues. These effects are likely the result of 3 key things - compromised diet, sleep deprivation and, the key issue, chronic stress. Those 3 make a pretty good team when it comes to causing poor health.
Now, having said all that, the fact that these folks have irregular meal patterns and disrupted circadian rhythms may play a role too.
Humans are pretty damn good at adapting to different meal patterns. Most of this is regulated by Ghrelin and is known officially as "entrainment" = Ghrelin increasing in anticipation of a meal and preparing your metabolism to handle what is to come. This works because the stomach cells that produce Ghrelin happen to have their own little circadian clocks that sync up with your metabolism to anticipate food.
I don't want to make this too complicated so here is the gist of it: Stomach tells brain when to eat, which helps establish a regular meal habitual meal pattern, which in turn helps regulate the release of Ghrelin. This means eating all the time is a bad thing for Ghrelin control and having a fixed meal schedule is a good thing.
The whole point of Ghrlein being released before meal time is to trigger food seeking behaviour. It also stimulates brain functions like learning & memory development. This actually makes a lot of evolutionary sense - the urge to find food gives us enhanced skills to ensure survival ie make you better at finding food.
Along side this, we have the circadian rhythm (your sleep/wake cycle) that is regulated by daylight and, to a much greater degree in 2017, your habitual patterns. The circadian rhythm is too involved in helping your metabolism adapt to different circumstances. All of these adaptation mechanisms are about your body wanting to be as proactive, rather than reactive, as possible - smart approach to take.
So, we can see that your body likes to anticipate a certain routine everyday based on your habitual diet/sleep patterns and adjusts its hormonal profile & metabolism accordingly. Now, if these patterns are irregular, your body has no time to adapt. This is the case with shift workers and might explain, at least partially, why they're so susceptible to many health disorders - like having a less favorable hormonal profile.
Of course it's important to point out that shift workers with fixed patterns (always working nights, etc) are still better off than those with unpredictable patterns (rotating day/night shifts) because at least you're giving your body some time to re-entrain the circadian rhythm. For shift workers with unpredictable patterns, the circadian rhythm is a permanent mess, which is not a good thing.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we have so many confounders present in shift workers that it's practically impossible to isolate what is causing what so blaming the late night eating alone is, again, plain stupid.
Ramadan
Studies looking into Ramadan tend to lack caloric control but are still worth mentioning because man, if there was ever an obvious example showing that "eating most of your cals/carbs at night makes you fat" is complete bullshit, it's this one.
These folks eat everything in the evening and the data shows a mostly neutral, sometimes positive, effect on bf% and other health parameters.
Let me be blunt. If these folks eat all of their calories & carbs in the evening (sometimes up to 1am-2am) with no real negative effects then why the **** are some of you worrying about those extra 50g of carbs in your last meal? Come on bro, you're better than that.
Controlled studies
All of these studies contain fixed calories for all groups with the only variable at play being the distribution. The late meal groups contain 67-100% of total cals between 6pm-bedtime so let's see if this myth has any truth to it (as if you weren't aware by now what the answer is going to be).
1) Chronobiological Aspects of Weight Loss in Obesity: Effects of Different Meal Timing Regimens
The first ever calorie controlled study on meal timing found that weight loss did not differ between groups who consumed all their calories at 10AM or 6PM. No difference was seen for cortisol, BP or REE either but fat oxidation was consistently higher in the PM group. Not that this means much of anything since the study duration was only 15 days.
2) The role of breakfast in the treatment of obesity
Moving into the early 90s we have a well designed 12 week study involving habitual breakfast eaters and non-breakfast eaters placed in a breakfast or non-breakfast group. Fat loss was greater among former breakfast eaters who followed the non-breakfast diet. This group ate lunch and dinner while consuming 2/3 of their calories at dinner (6PM+). However, they also found that former breakfast skippers who were put on a breakfast diet got more favorable results than those who continued the breakfast skipping pattern. Hmm.
These seemingly contradictory results might be explained by impulse control. People in the general population who have poor eating habits, including breakfast skipping, tend to also have uninhibited and impulsive eating patterns. Giving these folks breakfast might therefore be a huge benefit. Then you have better control in the group skipping breakfast who normally consumes it. This group is more relevant to our community since we tend to track cals/macros and don't just mindlessly eat whatever.
Another interesting finding was that the breakfast eating groups had an increase in depression-induced eating while the complete opposite occurred in the no breakfast group. The folks in the breakfast group also saw the diet as more restrictive:
"...the larger meal size of the no-breakfast group caused less disruption of the meal patterns and social life than did the smaller meal sizes in the breakfast condition."
These favorable effects likely explain the greater compliance rate of the no breakfast group at follow up 6 months later (81% vs 60%).
There were no differences between groups in regards to the weight loss composition (75% fat /25% lean mass) or RMR.
3) Weight loss is greater with consumption of large morning meals and fat-free mass is preserved with large evening meals in women on a controlled weight reduction regimen
The late 90s give us a study with subjects alternating between two, 6 week phases on the same diet of which 70% of calories were eaten in the morning or evening. The morning group had greater weight loss compared to the evening BUT that extra weight was in the form of muscle mass. The larger evening meals preserved muscle mass better and resulted in a greater reduction of overall bf%:
"The greater weight loss associated with the AM [morning] pattern that we found in our study was due primarily to loss of fat-free mass, which averaged about 1 kg more for the AM pattern than for the PM pattern."
Some of you may get excited by these results but keep in mind the small sample size (10 subjects) and the fact that they measured body comp using total body electrical conductivity (similar to BIA and I've already illustrated how inaccurate that is here under the "form, dose, duration and assessment tools" section).
This study included weight training 3x/week, which may explain the difference in body comp between the group since the PM group consumed a greater % of their cals postwo. That is a big MAY. Here are the meal setups:
AM -
Breakfast, 8-8.30AM: 35% of total cals
Weight training (circuit), 9-9.30 AM
Lunch, 11-12PM: 35%
Dinner, 4.30-5PM: 15%
Evening snack, 8-8.30PM: 15%
PM -
Breakfast, 8-8.30AM: 15% of total cals
Weight training (circuit), 9-9.30 AM
Lunch, 11-12PM: 15%
Dinner, 4.30-5PM: 35%
Evening snack, 8-8.30PM: 35%
A slight anecdotal tangent to show that real life results support the data re eating most of your cals at night won't make you fat, here is an example of what some of my clients (including fitness models) do:
- Prewo meal (20-25% of daily cals), lift 2hrs later, postwo meal (largest of the day), final meal 3 hrs later
-This has them consume both postwo meals in the evening, containing 75%+ of total cals and 200g+ of carbs, with no worries about fat gain. Just saying
4) Influence of meal time on salivary circadian cortisol rhythms and weight loss in obese women
This 2000s study using almost the same protocol as study 1), found that splitting the calories evenly into 5 meals consumed every other hour between 9AM-8PM, eating all cals in the morning (9-11AM) or in the evening (6-8PM) did not affect weight loss, metabolic rate or cortisol differently.
The main limitation here, again, is the short study duration for each phase (18 days). You would think that using a similar protocol to a previous study the authors would at least correct the major limitation of said previous study but apparently not.
5) Greater weight loss and hormonal changes after 6 months diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner
This study comes from 2011 and shows, over 6 months, subjects who ate most of their carbs at dinner (8PM+) lost more fat, experienced greater fullness throughout the diet and saw more favorable hormonal changes than those who ate their carbs earlier in the day. Eyebrow raising results that require more in depth analysis.
This study dug deeper into the finding that the diurnal peak of Leptin can be altered. This discovery was made in a Ramadan study where average leptin levels stayed the same but the pattern changed:
"Previous studies have described a typical diurnal pattern of leptin secretion that falls during the day from 0800 to 1600 hours, reaching a nadir at 1300 hours and increases from 1600 with a zenith at 0100 hours. Ironically, this crucial hormone responsible for satiety is at its highest levels when individuals are sleeping...It was hypothesized that consumption of carbohydrates mostly in the evening would modify the typical diurnal pattern of leptin secretion as observed in Muslim populations during Ramadan."
For those wanting to know more about Leptin, I'd urge you to look into Lyle McDonalds work since he's covered it extensively but suffice to say that Leptin is the most important hormone when it comes to fat loss maintenance. It controls a whole host of things that crash when dieting and make you feel like shit = impossible to stay at that level of conditioning year round. If it is possible to manipulate it so that it peaks during the day, rather than night, then that could be a big deal. Keeping it higher during the day might help with appetite control, which is crucial for fat loss maintenance.
The key question here: is it possible to shift leptin secretion to induce greater satiety and diet adherence during morning and noon of the next day, instead of having leptin peak during night time (as it does normally)?
Important to point out that the key to leptin manipulation is carbs. It may be possible to eat carbs before you go to sleep and not experience the peak until you wake up in the morning (an added bonus is that many sleep better with some carbs pre-bedtime due to the serotonin boost).
Both groups received the same hypocaloric diet divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner and 3 "snacks" (morning, afternoon, night):
1300-1500 kcal
45-50% carbs
30-35% fat
20% protein
Group A received the carbs evenly split throughout the day.
Group B received the majority of their carbs (~170 g) at dinner.
There are no details about the exact macro breakdown at each meal but based on the menus of each respective group, it looks like around 100-120g carbs at dinner in group B.
Both groups lost weight and saw improvements on several health markers but group B lost more weight (-11 kg vs -9 kg), body fat (-7% vs -5%), stayed fuller and had a better hormonal profile:
"Hunger scores were lower and greater improvements in fasting glucose, average daily insulin concentrations, and homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMAIR), T-cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, C-reactive protein (CRP), tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels were observed in comparison to controls."
But the most interesting part, at least for those of us who want to maintain low bf%, was that the carb-rich dinner increased average leptin levels compared to the standard diet:
"Our experimental diet might manipulate daily leptin secretion, leading to higher relative concentrations throughout the day. We propose that this modification of hormone secretion helped participants experience greater satiety during waking hours, enhance diet maintenance over time and have better anthropometric outcomes."
To be clear, leptin still fell from baseline but not as much compared to the standard diet (20.6% vs 26.2%). This may help explain why my intermittent fasting clients find it easier to stay lean year round. And when I say lean I am talking legit 6-7% and no, some are not genetically blessed for leanness (they are actually natural fatties).
4 decades worth of data and I can keep going but I think you all get the picture. Carbs at night are perfectly fine and even optimal for some folks.
Conclusion
Observational studies do find associations between meal patterns and obesity but this is attributed to poor behavioural habits rather than meal timing per se. People who eat more in the evening simply eat more calories overall, which explains why they weigh more.
Controlled studies that match calories and look at the effect of distributing those calories through out the day paint a completely different picture.
The short term studies (15-18 days) find no significant difference between early vs late meal patterns while most long term studies (>12 weeks) show that late meal patterns produce superior results for body comp. This might be explained by better nutrient partitioning after meals due to hormonal modulation, which causes better dietary adherence rates. In other words, people find it easier to eat the majority of their cals at night. I've said it a bunch of times but adherence > everything else when it comes to body comp.
So there ya go. Nothing wrong with eating big at night. Those who were not aware have hopefully learnt. Those who don't care and want to stick to their beliefs will at least do us the curtsy of not spreading this complete and utter bullshit.
A common belief, completely lacking in logical thinking, is that you should avoid eating most of your cals/carbs in the evening because it can cause fat gain, make you unhealthy, etc. This is bullshit. As we'll see, not only is there nothing to support this but also quite a bit showing the complete opposite.
The majority of studies with matched calories have actually found that eating later is superior for body comp & health and yet this piece of broscience is alive and well (I know members of this very board who believe it). So, time to kill it off completely. Well, hopefully anyway.
Origin
The late night eating myth may have originated from observational studies that consistently find a positive relationship between calories consumed in the evening and high bf% in the genera population. So it's the classic mistake of assuming correlation = causation when it very much does not. Those same studies show that the general population consumes too many calories overall, the real cause of the problem, so to blame it on the distribution is plain stupid.
The same positive relationship is found in other observational research showing that people who skip breakfast, eat late at night, etc are fatter than those who eat breakfast, have regular meals, eat less in the evening, etc. Again, this has nothing to do with the caloric distribution. Those same studies illustrate that these folks who skip breakfast, lunch, etc have unhealthy behavioral patterns in general:
"Late night eating is not only correlated to a higher calorie intake, but also less sleep time and more sedentary activities, i.e. watching TV and more time spent in front of the computer, which are additional confounders that can predispose people to weight gain."
The point I'm trying to make here is that observational data isn't telling us that eating later in the day = weight gain. It's telling us that an overall unhealthy lifestyle = weight gain. Controlled studies in general do not show larger evening meals negatively impacting body comp compared to eating earlier in the day but, before I get into that, 2 population groups that need to be discussed.
Shift workers
You will find studies claiming that late night eating is bad for shift workers. The problem here is that these studies are uncontrolled (re calories) and confounded by the fact that shift work itself has an independent negative effect on metabolic health.
Shift-workers are predisposed to a bunch of problems including obesity, cardiovascular disease and gastrointestinal issues. These effects are likely the result of 3 key things - compromised diet, sleep deprivation and, the key issue, chronic stress. Those 3 make a pretty good team when it comes to causing poor health.
Now, having said all that, the fact that these folks have irregular meal patterns and disrupted circadian rhythms may play a role too.
Humans are pretty damn good at adapting to different meal patterns. Most of this is regulated by Ghrelin and is known officially as "entrainment" = Ghrelin increasing in anticipation of a meal and preparing your metabolism to handle what is to come. This works because the stomach cells that produce Ghrelin happen to have their own little circadian clocks that sync up with your metabolism to anticipate food.
I don't want to make this too complicated so here is the gist of it: Stomach tells brain when to eat, which helps establish a regular meal habitual meal pattern, which in turn helps regulate the release of Ghrelin. This means eating all the time is a bad thing for Ghrelin control and having a fixed meal schedule is a good thing.
The whole point of Ghrlein being released before meal time is to trigger food seeking behaviour. It also stimulates brain functions like learning & memory development. This actually makes a lot of evolutionary sense - the urge to find food gives us enhanced skills to ensure survival ie make you better at finding food.
Along side this, we have the circadian rhythm (your sleep/wake cycle) that is regulated by daylight and, to a much greater degree in 2017, your habitual patterns. The circadian rhythm is too involved in helping your metabolism adapt to different circumstances. All of these adaptation mechanisms are about your body wanting to be as proactive, rather than reactive, as possible - smart approach to take.
So, we can see that your body likes to anticipate a certain routine everyday based on your habitual diet/sleep patterns and adjusts its hormonal profile & metabolism accordingly. Now, if these patterns are irregular, your body has no time to adapt. This is the case with shift workers and might explain, at least partially, why they're so susceptible to many health disorders - like having a less favorable hormonal profile.
Of course it's important to point out that shift workers with fixed patterns (always working nights, etc) are still better off than those with unpredictable patterns (rotating day/night shifts) because at least you're giving your body some time to re-entrain the circadian rhythm. For shift workers with unpredictable patterns, the circadian rhythm is a permanent mess, which is not a good thing.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we have so many confounders present in shift workers that it's practically impossible to isolate what is causing what so blaming the late night eating alone is, again, plain stupid.
Ramadan
Studies looking into Ramadan tend to lack caloric control but are still worth mentioning because man, if there was ever an obvious example showing that "eating most of your cals/carbs at night makes you fat" is complete bullshit, it's this one.
These folks eat everything in the evening and the data shows a mostly neutral, sometimes positive, effect on bf% and other health parameters.
Let me be blunt. If these folks eat all of their calories & carbs in the evening (sometimes up to 1am-2am) with no real negative effects then why the **** are some of you worrying about those extra 50g of carbs in your last meal? Come on bro, you're better than that.
Controlled studies
All of these studies contain fixed calories for all groups with the only variable at play being the distribution. The late meal groups contain 67-100% of total cals between 6pm-bedtime so let's see if this myth has any truth to it (as if you weren't aware by now what the answer is going to be).
1) Chronobiological Aspects of Weight Loss in Obesity: Effects of Different Meal Timing Regimens
The first ever calorie controlled study on meal timing found that weight loss did not differ between groups who consumed all their calories at 10AM or 6PM. No difference was seen for cortisol, BP or REE either but fat oxidation was consistently higher in the PM group. Not that this means much of anything since the study duration was only 15 days.
2) The role of breakfast in the treatment of obesity
Moving into the early 90s we have a well designed 12 week study involving habitual breakfast eaters and non-breakfast eaters placed in a breakfast or non-breakfast group. Fat loss was greater among former breakfast eaters who followed the non-breakfast diet. This group ate lunch and dinner while consuming 2/3 of their calories at dinner (6PM+). However, they also found that former breakfast skippers who were put on a breakfast diet got more favorable results than those who continued the breakfast skipping pattern. Hmm.
These seemingly contradictory results might be explained by impulse control. People in the general population who have poor eating habits, including breakfast skipping, tend to also have uninhibited and impulsive eating patterns. Giving these folks breakfast might therefore be a huge benefit. Then you have better control in the group skipping breakfast who normally consumes it. This group is more relevant to our community since we tend to track cals/macros and don't just mindlessly eat whatever.
Another interesting finding was that the breakfast eating groups had an increase in depression-induced eating while the complete opposite occurred in the no breakfast group. The folks in the breakfast group also saw the diet as more restrictive:
"...the larger meal size of the no-breakfast group caused less disruption of the meal patterns and social life than did the smaller meal sizes in the breakfast condition."
These favorable effects likely explain the greater compliance rate of the no breakfast group at follow up 6 months later (81% vs 60%).
There were no differences between groups in regards to the weight loss composition (75% fat /25% lean mass) or RMR.
3) Weight loss is greater with consumption of large morning meals and fat-free mass is preserved with large evening meals in women on a controlled weight reduction regimen
The late 90s give us a study with subjects alternating between two, 6 week phases on the same diet of which 70% of calories were eaten in the morning or evening. The morning group had greater weight loss compared to the evening BUT that extra weight was in the form of muscle mass. The larger evening meals preserved muscle mass better and resulted in a greater reduction of overall bf%:
"The greater weight loss associated with the AM [morning] pattern that we found in our study was due primarily to loss of fat-free mass, which averaged about 1 kg more for the AM pattern than for the PM pattern."
Some of you may get excited by these results but keep in mind the small sample size (10 subjects) and the fact that they measured body comp using total body electrical conductivity (similar to BIA and I've already illustrated how inaccurate that is here under the "form, dose, duration and assessment tools" section).
This study included weight training 3x/week, which may explain the difference in body comp between the group since the PM group consumed a greater % of their cals postwo. That is a big MAY. Here are the meal setups:
AM -
Breakfast, 8-8.30AM: 35% of total cals
Weight training (circuit), 9-9.30 AM
Lunch, 11-12PM: 35%
Dinner, 4.30-5PM: 15%
Evening snack, 8-8.30PM: 15%
PM -
Breakfast, 8-8.30AM: 15% of total cals
Weight training (circuit), 9-9.30 AM
Lunch, 11-12PM: 15%
Dinner, 4.30-5PM: 35%
Evening snack, 8-8.30PM: 35%
A slight anecdotal tangent to show that real life results support the data re eating most of your cals at night won't make you fat, here is an example of what some of my clients (including fitness models) do:
- Prewo meal (20-25% of daily cals), lift 2hrs later, postwo meal (largest of the day), final meal 3 hrs later
-This has them consume both postwo meals in the evening, containing 75%+ of total cals and 200g+ of carbs, with no worries about fat gain. Just saying
4) Influence of meal time on salivary circadian cortisol rhythms and weight loss in obese women
This 2000s study using almost the same protocol as study 1), found that splitting the calories evenly into 5 meals consumed every other hour between 9AM-8PM, eating all cals in the morning (9-11AM) or in the evening (6-8PM) did not affect weight loss, metabolic rate or cortisol differently.
The main limitation here, again, is the short study duration for each phase (18 days). You would think that using a similar protocol to a previous study the authors would at least correct the major limitation of said previous study but apparently not.
5) Greater weight loss and hormonal changes after 6 months diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner
This study comes from 2011 and shows, over 6 months, subjects who ate most of their carbs at dinner (8PM+) lost more fat, experienced greater fullness throughout the diet and saw more favorable hormonal changes than those who ate their carbs earlier in the day. Eyebrow raising results that require more in depth analysis.
This study dug deeper into the finding that the diurnal peak of Leptin can be altered. This discovery was made in a Ramadan study where average leptin levels stayed the same but the pattern changed:
"Previous studies have described a typical diurnal pattern of leptin secretion that falls during the day from 0800 to 1600 hours, reaching a nadir at 1300 hours and increases from 1600 with a zenith at 0100 hours. Ironically, this crucial hormone responsible for satiety is at its highest levels when individuals are sleeping...It was hypothesized that consumption of carbohydrates mostly in the evening would modify the typical diurnal pattern of leptin secretion as observed in Muslim populations during Ramadan."
For those wanting to know more about Leptin, I'd urge you to look into Lyle McDonalds work since he's covered it extensively but suffice to say that Leptin is the most important hormone when it comes to fat loss maintenance. It controls a whole host of things that crash when dieting and make you feel like shit = impossible to stay at that level of conditioning year round. If it is possible to manipulate it so that it peaks during the day, rather than night, then that could be a big deal. Keeping it higher during the day might help with appetite control, which is crucial for fat loss maintenance.
The key question here: is it possible to shift leptin secretion to induce greater satiety and diet adherence during morning and noon of the next day, instead of having leptin peak during night time (as it does normally)?
Important to point out that the key to leptin manipulation is carbs. It may be possible to eat carbs before you go to sleep and not experience the peak until you wake up in the morning (an added bonus is that many sleep better with some carbs pre-bedtime due to the serotonin boost).
Both groups received the same hypocaloric diet divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner and 3 "snacks" (morning, afternoon, night):
1300-1500 kcal
45-50% carbs
30-35% fat
20% protein
Group A received the carbs evenly split throughout the day.
Group B received the majority of their carbs (~170 g) at dinner.
There are no details about the exact macro breakdown at each meal but based on the menus of each respective group, it looks like around 100-120g carbs at dinner in group B.
Both groups lost weight and saw improvements on several health markers but group B lost more weight (-11 kg vs -9 kg), body fat (-7% vs -5%), stayed fuller and had a better hormonal profile:
"Hunger scores were lower and greater improvements in fasting glucose, average daily insulin concentrations, and homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMAIR), T-cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, C-reactive protein (CRP), tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels were observed in comparison to controls."
But the most interesting part, at least for those of us who want to maintain low bf%, was that the carb-rich dinner increased average leptin levels compared to the standard diet:
"Our experimental diet might manipulate daily leptin secretion, leading to higher relative concentrations throughout the day. We propose that this modification of hormone secretion helped participants experience greater satiety during waking hours, enhance diet maintenance over time and have better anthropometric outcomes."
To be clear, leptin still fell from baseline but not as much compared to the standard diet (20.6% vs 26.2%). This may help explain why my intermittent fasting clients find it easier to stay lean year round. And when I say lean I am talking legit 6-7% and no, some are not genetically blessed for leanness (they are actually natural fatties).
4 decades worth of data and I can keep going but I think you all get the picture. Carbs at night are perfectly fine and even optimal for some folks.
Conclusion
Observational studies do find associations between meal patterns and obesity but this is attributed to poor behavioural habits rather than meal timing per se. People who eat more in the evening simply eat more calories overall, which explains why they weigh more.
Controlled studies that match calories and look at the effect of distributing those calories through out the day paint a completely different picture.
The short term studies (15-18 days) find no significant difference between early vs late meal patterns while most long term studies (>12 weeks) show that late meal patterns produce superior results for body comp. This might be explained by better nutrient partitioning after meals due to hormonal modulation, which causes better dietary adherence rates. In other words, people find it easier to eat the majority of their cals at night. I've said it a bunch of times but adherence > everything else when it comes to body comp.
So there ya go. Nothing wrong with eating big at night. Those who were not aware have hopefully learnt. Those who don't care and want to stick to their beliefs will at least do us the curtsy of not spreading this complete and utter bullshit.
Last edited:
