The old saying “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper”, might actually be true, according to the latest scientific research.
Scientists at King’s College London have claimed when you eat could be just as important as what you eat, asserting that irregular eating and meal-skipping could be linked to a higher risk of metabolic syndrome, which includes high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The researchers made their claims in two review papers, published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society , which also calls for more large-scale studies in the future to establish the impact of chrono-nutrition on public health.
Chrono-nutrition is the principle of eating foods at times of the day when they are most useful, to meet your body’s energy requirements and prevent storage of food as fat in certain parts of the body.
The scientists argue that the rise in shift workers and “social jetlag”, where many of us live by social clocks rather than our internal body clocks, is leading to a change in food consumption patterns.
The scientists argue that over the past decades, more meals are being skipped, consumed outside the family home, on-the-go, later in the day and more irregularly.
The research claims that this is linked to how regularly people eat and what they choose to eat, for example with poorer food choices at lunch and dinner linked to breakfast skipping.
However, according to Dr Gerda Pot, visiting lecturer in the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division at King’s College London, while we have a much better understanding today of what we should be eating, we are still left with the question as to which meal should provide us with the most energy – hence why further research is required.
“Although the evidence suggests that eating more calories later in the evening is associated with obesity, we are still far from understanding whether our energy intake should be distributed equally across the day or whether breakfast should contribute the greatest proportion of energy, followed by lunch and dinner,” she said.
The scientists also suggested we need further study into “with whom we eat”, pointing to evidence that regular family meals contribute to healthy eating habits in children and adolescents.