It is generally accepted that eating dinner early is good for your health. A new cohort study provides further evidence that the habit significantly reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease and cerebrovascular pathologies such as strokes.

Researchers from the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team (EREN) at Sarbonne Paris North University and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health used data from 103,389 adults in the NutriNet-Santé cohort from 2009 to 2022 (79% women) to study the effects of meal times on cardiovascular disease risk. Self-questionnaires provided information on what people eat and at what time of day. "This allows us to define any food intake, not just breakfast," said EREN researcher Bernard Srour, who coordinated this study, published Thursday, December 14 in Nature Communications.

At a time when heart and cerebrovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and half of all cases are thought to be diet-related, the study concludes that eating breakfast and dinner late is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.

Extending the duration of night-time fasting

According to the study, delaying breakfast time is associated with a 6% increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease each hour. For example, a person usually eating breakfast at 9 am would have a 6% higher risk of cardiovascular disease than someone eating it at 8 am. Meanwhile, delaying dinner by an hour was associated with an 8% increased risk of stroke for each additional hour, although the habit did not increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

More generally, eating late, after 9 pm, is associated with a 28% increase in the risk of developing a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or a completed stroke compared with dining before 8 pm. "Mind you, this is not a variation of one hour, we compared all those who eat before 9 pm and those who eat after, which also includes people who eat after midnight," Srour explained.

Another result of the study is a correlation between longer nocturnal fasting (the time between the last meal of the day and breakfast the next day) and decreased cardiovascular risk. However, "this period must be coupled with a first food intake early in the morning," the researcher pointed out.

A suggested explanation for the results is that, like light and our daily activities, food is a well-known external synchronizer of the circadian clock and the peripheral clocks of the circadian system, located in most of our organs, particularly the liver. These clocks regulate the rhythms of blood pressure and metabolic processes.

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