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Eating late can change how you burn calories and store fat, study shows (www.sciencealert.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A study suggests eating later in the day can directly impact our biological weight regulation in three key ways: through the number of calories that we burn; our hunger levels; and the way our bodies store fat.

With obesity now affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide, this is a valuable insight into how the risk of becoming obese could be lowered in a relatively simple way – just by eating our meals a few hours earlier.

Earlier studies had already identified a link between the timing of meals and weight gain, but here the researchers wanted to look at that link more closely, as well as teasing out the biological reasons behind it.

"We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk," said neuroscientist Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in 2022 when the study was published.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Haha, same - yes, I think you are right - I think we come from the perspective that a calorie is what the definition says it is, which is an energy unit. And this makes the saying "a calorie is not a calorie" sound wrong. Yeah, seems like it's an emotional trigger for some, which is understandable.

I don't get why this is such a problem to point out that maybe they themselves use the word calorie in a different context than it was actually intended to be used. And this does not help the confusion surrounding the topic.

The problem, I think, is that a calorie is used to describe the energy content of something and not for anything else. It is useful for food since the inherent value of energy that we need to transform every day to survive can also be expressed in calories (and so can be almost anything), which makes it easy to eyeball how much energy we can "absorb/transform" from a given product. But this does not describe how healthy or nutritious or anything else the product is or how your body is going to deal with it; it just describes the energy content of the thing.

A calorie is a measurement of energy and nothing else.

And I am sure you are right; at the end of the day, you can boil it down to one number that's either negative, 0, or positive, i.e., your calorie deficit. If it's negative, you used more energy than you took in, so you will need to take that energy from somewhere, which will result in some form of burning of fat or other tissues to transform the stored energy into something we can use actively, which then means you will lose weight over time. Energy can't be created, at least not to my limited knowledge, only transformed. Of course, given that your body works within the normal human norms.

Anyway, thanks for the nice interaction. 😄

I wish you all the best this year! Have a great life!