Useful information

Are you conscious of “eating time”?

2020/05/01

This year’s Golden Week has become “Stay Home” week.
In the first place, many people have stayed home because they switched to working from home even
before the start of the consecutive holidays. Hence, the rhythm of life can easily become disordered.
Does your meal time vary from day to day? Do you skip breakfast, or eat late in the evening?
Not only what you eat and how much you eat, but also when you eat is important.

Why breakfast is so important

When the rhythm of life is disturbed, there might be some people who wake up late in the morning
and skip breakfast.
However, having breakfast is important in addition to providing the nutrition needed for morning
activities .
When you eat a meal, part of the ingested energy, called “meal-induced heat production,” is
consumed as heat. After eating a meal, you feel that your body is warmed. That is the effect of
diet-induced thermogenesis. So, having breakfast also means raising your body temperature.

Another importance of eating breakfast is that the biological clock will better organize you.
The body clock is a mechanism that keeps a 24-hour rhythm in our body. In the morning you
become awake, at night you feel sleepy. Body temperature, blood pressure, balance of the
autonomic nerve, and secretion of hormones have to be adjusted. The structure of our inner clock is
not exactly a 24-hour cycle; actually, it’s a little longer than 24 hours.
Therefore, you need to reset it every morning. There are known methods of reset which include
“morning exposure to light ,” and “eating breakfast ”

When to eat breakfast to adjust your body clock

There are three points to consider for having breakfast at the same time to adjust the body clock .

・ Eat breakfast at the same time every day as often as possible
The rhythm is adjusted by having breakfast at the same time .
・ Leave the stomach empty about 10 hours after you eat dinner the day before
Having breakfast after a long fast will enhance the effect of resetting your body clock.
Therefore, it is important to have dinner early and not to eat late at night .
– Eat carbohydrates and protein together
It has been found that eating breakfast which contains sugar and protein has the effect of
resetting the body clock.

There are times when it is easy to gain weight, and times when it is difficult to gain weight

It is also known that even if you eat the same amount , the effect on the body changes depending on
the time you eat .
The ” meal-induced thermogenesis” introduced earlier seems to be lower when the meal time is later
at night, even if the same amount of food is eaten. In other words, eating in the afternoon or at late
night consumes less energy than eating breakfast in the morning.
Partly because of this, it has been reported that a nighttime lifestyle where people skip meals and
have a midnight snack can easily lead to weight gain.

We also know that “the midnight snack is easily stored as fat”.
There are several “clock genes” that control the body clock, one of which is ” BMAL1 “. This BMAL1
promotes creation of fat, so if BMAL1 acts acutely, you will easily store fat.
And the amount of BMAL1 fluctuates during the day; the largest increase is around 2:00 a.m., and
the smallest increase is around 2:00 p.m.
Therefore, eating a midnight snack or sweets at midnight when BMAL1 increases makes food intake
easier to accumulate as fat than eating at lunch time.

What “ chrono-nutrition ” teaches

“Chrono-nutrition” is attracting attention as a new nutritional science that considers “when to eat” in
addition to “what and how much to eat “. In this column, I have shared what I learned from
chrononutrition, but in the end, it means that “eating 3 meals, at a regular time”, which has been
taught for a long time, is effective.
When you are staying at home, your meal times tend to be different, so be careful what time you eat!

By the way, Metro Pharmacy has started an online medication service, so you can safely receive
medicine without leaving the house. For details, please contact each Metro Pharmacy store.

Reference
* Nakamura, D. et al. “Effects of mealtime changes on diet-induced thermogenesis in young girls”
(2010)
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsnfs/63/3/63_3_101/_pdf