Eat your meals in 10 hours to lead a healthy life

Scientists have found that limited the time frame to eat all your meals of the day within 10 hours can help in improving overall health of humans.

Our mornings start with a cup of tea and the day ends with the dinner at least 14-15 hours later, and that might be causing a lot of health issues. Yes, that's what a research team has recently found during a study on mice.

During the study, the researchers from the Salk Institute, California, discovered that mice who lacked healthy metabolisms can be protected against obesity and few lifestyle diseases when they can only eat during a 10-hour window.

For this study, the scientists disabled the genes that control the mice's circadian rhythms. That rhythm is the physical, behavioural and mental changes that happens in the body. Without this body's biological clock, the mice were prone to diabetes, obesity, elevated blood cholesterol and fatty liver disease.

The study, published in Cell Metabolism, said that the scientists divided the mice into two groups, one with 24-access to food and the other with, another with same number of calories, but only allowed to eat for 10 hours a day. At the end of the study, they found that the group which ate any time became obese and developed metabolic diseases. And the group that was on the 10-hour window were lean and healthy.

Amandine Chaix, the first author said that from the previous study, they were under the impression that the biological clock was internally timing the process of turning genes for metabolism on and off at predetermined times. And while that may still be true, there work suggested that by controlling the animals' feeding and fasting cycles, they could basically override the lack of an internal timing system with an external timing system.

Satchidananda Panda, a professor in Salk's Regulatory Biology Laboratory and the senior author on the paper added that people may have one or more disease-causing defective genes that make them feel helpless and destined to be sick. But the finding that a good lifestyle could beat the bad effects of defective genes opened new hope of staying healthy.