The Tamesis
It’s common to feel a little under the weather right now. Doctors say the colder months are a good time to rethink your evening routine — including the best time to eat dinner. and when What you eat is almost the same as What You eat, especially in the winter.
If you feel like you’re doing great or can’t handle any changes in your life right now, that’s fair. But if you can’t shake the feeling that you’re driving the struggle bus, adjusting the timing of your last meal of the day is worth considering. While it won’t magically turn things around, there are a few reasons to consider adjusting your dinner schedule. Here’s what doctors have to say about the best time for dinner.
Why do you need to adjust your dinner time in winter?
It’s important to get this out of the way ahead of time: There’s no research that shows definitively that you should adjust your dinner times in the winter. “However, there is a lot of indirect evidence pointing in that direction,” Ashkan Farhadi, MD, a gastroenterologist at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California, told us Fashion.
Dr. Farhadi says a lot depends on your circadian rhythm. This is your body’s internal 24-hour clock, and it affects many different factors in your health, says Christopher Winter, M.D., sleep medicine specialist, neurologist and author of Sleep Medicine Sleep Solutions: Why your sleep is ruined and how to fix it,explain. “Your circadian rhythm and circadian factors affect the time you fall asleep and wake up, and can have a huge impact on your overall health,” he says.
Dr. Winter explains that as part of your circadian rhythm, when it gets dark, your body starts producing melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep. (This is part of the reason why you may feel sleepy earlier in the winter.)
Dr. Winter says if you’re used to this and going to bed earlier than before, it’s a good idea to increase your dinner time to make sure you’re still following your circadian rhythm. “Everything we do—especially physical movement, exposure to light, and diet—are little clues that our bodies use to understand where we are in time,” he said. “Dinner time was a hint.”
Dr. Winter says if you tend to eat dinner at the same time every night but your bedtime is earlier, your sleep will be abnormal. “In addition to going to bed with more food in your stomach (which is bad for sleep), you’re also signaling to your body that it’s customary to go to bed later, but you’ve moved your bedtime earlier,” he says. “It can be disorienting and can be a trigger for insomnia.”
Shabnam Sarker, MD, assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, agrees. “Eating earlier in the day is generally better for overall health because it aligns with your natural circadian rhythm,” she explains. “It is associated with improvements in cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity and diabetes.”
Dr. Farhadi says early melatonin production also directly affects your gut. “At night, melatonin signals to the gut that it’s time to slow down,” he says. So your intestines relax earlier than before, and you may go to bed earlier. The last thing you want to do, says Dr. Farhadi, is go to bed with a full stomach, which can lead to uncomfortable gastrointestinal issues like reflux and general discomfort.
When is the best time to have dinner in winter?
As you can imagine, it’s difficult to make a blanket recommendation that everyone should eat at the same time in the winter. Still, science provides some clues about the general time frame.
