The Best Time for Dinner, Health-wise

The science is settled: eat more steak dinners.

The best time to eat dinner "is four hours before bedtime": [bold added]

The most important factor in the dinnertime calculus is melatonin, the hormone that signals it’s time to sleep, says Satchidananda Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Melatonin, which begins to rise about three hours before we go to bed, also tells the pancreas to cut back on insulin production. If we have a sugar spike after eating late, our body has a harder time regulating blood sugar, Panda says. This could put us at risk of diabetes and other metabolic disorders. For that reason, he says the ideal dinnertime is three to four hours before bed.

What we eat for dinner matters, too. Slower-digesting food like meat keeps us full longer.

“Only in the last hundred years have we seen easily digestible, highly processed food,” Panda says, explaining that nearly 70% of the calories we eat now come from carbohydrates.

For weight control we have long been advised that late-night eating is bad. Now the adage has meat on its bones: snacking leads to a sugar spike, just when insulin production is decreasing before bedtime. Such "hormonal fluctuations" lead to weight gain, diabetes, and other health problems.

Speaking of meat, dinnertime consumption of slower-digesting food leaves us with a longer feeling of fullness, which reduces the desire to snack and the chances that hunger pangs will awaken us too early.

Taking this advice seriously, I'm not going to reach for the chips but a glass of warm milk before bedtime. Grandma always knew best.