The benefit of time-restricted eating
Highlights
- Dr Evelyn Parr explores how time-restricted eating could improve blood sugar control and support people living with type 2 diabetes.
- Her research shows that limiting meals to a consistent eating window can reduce late-night snacking and better align eating with the body's natural rhythms.
- She highlights time-restricted eating as a simple, practical approach that could help more people improve their long-term health.
Dr Evelyn Parr from the Mary Mackillop Institute for Health Research reveals how a new study into time restricted eating could be a gamechanger for those with type 2 diabetes, and the perils of late night snacking for everyone.
Dr Parr has always been interested in diet and exercise, “but I’m not really someone who worries about the top one per cent gains for athletes,” she said. “I’d much rather contribute to a larger pool. I want to work with people that are trying to find healthy ways of living and understand how diet and exercise have an effect.”
Good timing
Dr Parr’s latest research questions whether time-restricted eating could be an option for curbing the diabetes epidemic, and possibly help us all live healthier lives. This is particularly good news for the more than one million Australians who have type 2 diabetes.
The research Dr Parr conducted found that eating all meals and snacks within a nine-hour window, and fasting for the rest of the time, was a good way to limit post-dinner snacking. For many of us with busy lifestyles, our tendency to start eating early and not stop until just before bed is a pattern playing havoc with our health.
“The best way to describe it is we all have an internal body clock that tells us when it’s time to sleep, when to wake up, and we have different hormones working at different times,” she explained. “And with so many of us having easy access to food literally 24 hours a day with no restrictions, it encourages us to lengthen our eating time through the day and night. But this includes the times when our bodies are not really prepared or naturally ready to eat.
“So, if someone eats until 10pm or later and then has breakfast at 7am, they don’t have a long overnight fasting period,” she said. “The length of that period seems to be important in improving and regulating metabolism.
“The end of the day is when our body responds poorly to insulin – the hormone released from the pancreas in response to food. When we eat late, insulin doesn’t work as well, so we get exacerbated glucose responses to that food. It’s also when we eat our biggest meals and consume sugary snacks and alcohol.
