A study in mice has shown that eating during what would normally be a resting period helps build muscle fibres needed for endurance running, though this has yet to be confirmed in humans
By Carissa Wong
26 June 2023
Endurance running requires a specific type of muscle fibres
Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
Shifting your mealtimes to eat later in the day and during the night could boost your exercise endurance, suggests a study in mice.
Limiting your eating to within windows of six to 12 hours during daytime, without necessarily altering what or how much you eat, has been previously found to improve weight loss, reduce harmful spikes in blood sugar levels and lower blood pressure. But now it seems night-time eating could also offer benefits, says Min-Dian Li at the Army Medical University in China.
Earlier studies have shown that mice that eat only in the day – when, unlike us, they usually rest – are at greater risk of developing diabetes and a build-up of fat in their livers compared with mice that eat at any time. There is also evidence that people who work and eat at nights have increased risk of diabetes.
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But Li and his colleagues have now found that mice that eat during their resting hours, the equivalent of our night, may perform better in exercise endurance tests. “If we treat the mice with this schedule for just a short time it has a beneficial effect on running performance,” he says.
The researchers assigned 30 mice to feed on a diet of cereal grains in either a 12-hour period when lights were on or a 12-hour period when lights were off, each day for three weeks. Another group of 16 mice were allowed to eat whenever they wanted over the same time period.
Using a treadmill, the team found that mice that only ate in the day could run for twice as long compared with mice that only ate in the night or whenever they wanted.