Perspective: Time-Restricted Eating—Integrating the What with the When

Feb 16, 2022Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.)

Time-Restricted Eating: Combining What You Eat with When You Eat

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Circadian Biology on OpenScience ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Abstract

Time-restricted eating (TRE) allows for energy intake during a ∼8-10 h daily eating window.

TRE may provide health benefits that are independent of weight loss.
Current TRE research often overlooks the macronutrient composition and energy density of consumed foods.
A more rigorous collection and reporting of dietary data is needed in future TRE studies.
Understanding both the timing and type of food consumed is crucial for optimizing metabolic health outcomes.

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Time-restricted eating (TRE) is a popular dietary strategy that emphasizes the timing of meals in alignment with diurnal circadian rhythms, permitting ad libitum energy intake during a restricted (∼8-10 h) eating window each day. Unlike energy-restricted diets or intermittent fasting interventions that focus on weight loss, many of the health-related benefits of TRE are independent of reductions in body weight. However, TRE research to date has largely ignored what food is consumed (i.e., macronutrient composition and energy density), overlooking a plethora of past epidemiological and interventional dietary research. To determine some of the potential mechanisms underpinning the benefits of TRE on metabolic health, future studies need to increase the rigor of dietary data collected, assessed, and reported to ensure a consistent and standardized approach in TRE research. This Perspective article provides an overview of studies investigating TRE interventions in humans and considers dietary intake (both what and when food is eaten) and their impact on selected health outcomes (i.e., weight loss, glycemic control). Integrating existing dietary knowledge about what food is eaten with our recent understanding on when food should be consumed is essential to optimize the impact of dietary strategies aimed at improving metabolic health outcomes.

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Perspective: Time-Restricted Eating—Integrating the What with the When

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