So Grandma Was Right, After All

Research finally backs folk wisdom that meal timings may affect your health

Regular meals at regular times,’’ ‘‘Don’t eat meals too late at night’’: advice that parents have always been free with, but words that have been backed by little or no evidence. Once again, though, medical research is demonstrating that what passes for folk wisdom may have a grain of biological truth. According to a new study at the school of medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, eating at the wrong time has a serious consequence for fruit flies—a decline in fertility.

Amita Sehgal, lead author of the study, cautions that what is true in flies grown in a lab does not necessarily hold for humans, and a similar link in humans would require further research. ‘‘I wouldn’t say eating at the wrong time of the day makes people less fertile, though that is the implication,’’ says Sehgal. ‘‘I would say that eating at the wrong time of the day has deleterious consequences for physiology.’’

The researchers carried out their work by desynchronising two of the body clocks in fruit flies that control physiological functions. The body clock that controls our sleep patterns is well known and the effects of disrupting it are quite apparent in anyone who has suffered from jet lag. Among workers who work night shifts, these effects are more permanent and show up in the form of psychological and metabolic disturbances. 

A university press release details how Sehgal’s work has taken this knowledge much further: ‘In 2008, Sehgal’s team discovered that the fruit fly equivalent of the liver, called the fat body, has its own clock, which controls eating and food storage. They wanted to know what would happen if the fat body clock became desynchronised from the master clock in the brain…the researchers attempted to decouple the fat body and central clocks by keeping the flies in constant darkness and feeding them at times when they don’t normally eat. They found that flies fed at the ‘right’ time of the day deposited about 8 eggs per day, compared to about 5 when they fed at the ‘wrong’ time.’

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Hartosh Singh Bal