Cutting Calories In Daytime-Only Eating Diet May Slow Down Aging, Study Suggests

Aug, 2022 - by CMI

According to a new study, caloric restricted diets could significantly benefit lifespan when it is combined with time-restricted eating

Having a healthy lifestyle is important nowadays to maintain good health and wellbeing. Studies continue to find valuable insights into healthy habits benefiting human health. Now, scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute found in a mice study that a certain balance of restricting calorie intake and time-restricted eating could be a promising way to increase lifespan significantly.

There are many studies that are investigating ways of fasting beneficially affecting health. The latest study conducted at Howard Hughes Medical Institute included study of hundreds of mice placed on different regimes of diet for a four-year period. The scientists not only explored how time-restricted diet slows down aging, they also explored how time-restricted diet paired with carful caloric restriction affects the health. The researchers housed the mice with automatic feeders with some of the mice allowed to eat how much ever they wanted and other mice were restricted to 30 to 40% calories with different eating schedules, where some of them were fed at only at night when they were at highest activity level. The scientists observed that calorie restriction alone extended the lifespan of mice by 10%; however, when it was combined with time restricted diet, which was night-time only eating, the lifespan of these mice increase by 35%.

Furthermore, these results indicated that time-restricted dieting benefits the body without causing weightless. The combination restricted calorie intake and night-time eating increased the two-year lifespan of mice by nine months. According to the scientists, learning more about how calorie-restricted diets interact with circadian rhythm of the body is a key focus to move forward in this research, which would help to development of more efficient calorie-restricted diets or drugs mimicking these effects.