Have you ever noticed that every month seems to bring a trendy new diet and yet

obesity rates continue to rise and with it a growing number of health problems.

That's why I wrote my new book How Not To Diet. Check it out at your local public

library. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

What we eat is most important, but when we eat can make a difference too. In our

first story we put time restricted eating to the test. The reason many blood tests

are taken before eating after an overnight fast is that meals can tip our system

out of balance, bumping up certain biomarkers for disease such as blood sugars,

insulin, cholesterol, triglycerides. Yet fewer than one in 10 Americans may even

make it 12 hours without eating. As evolutionarily unnatural eating three meals a day is,

most of us are eating even more than that. One study using a smartphone app to record more than

25,000 eating events found that people tended to eat about every three hours over an average

span of about 15 hours a day might it be beneficial to give our bodies a bigger break.

Time restricted feeding is defined as fasting for periods of at least 12 hours but less than 24 hours.

This involves trying to confine calorie intake to a set window of time, typically three to four

hours, seven to nine hours, or 10 to 12 hours a day resulting in a daily fast lasting 12 to 21 hours.

When mice are restricted to a daily feeding window they gain less weight even when fed the exact

same amount. Rodents have such high metabolism so that a single day of fasting can starve

away as much as 15% of their lean body mass. This makes it difficult to extrapolate from mouse models.

You don't know what happens in humans until you put it to the test. The dropout rates in

time restricted feeding trials certainly appear lower than most prolonged forms of intermittent fasting

suggesting it's more easily terrible but does it work. If you have people even just stop eating

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