It turns out that when we eat may be as important as what we eat. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period may override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice.

In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory reported that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The study sought to determine whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles.

‘It’s a dogma that a high-fat diet leads to obesity and that we should eat frequently when we are awake,’ says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory and senior author of the paper. ‘Our findings, however, suggest that regular eating times and fasting for a significant number of hours a day might be beneficial to our health.’

Panda’s team fed two sets of mice, which shared the same genes, gender and age, a diet comprising 60 percent of its calories […]