What's The Best Time To Eat Dinner? Gen Z Might Actually Be Onto Something

Forget 7pm and even 8pm meals, there’s a growing trend for an earlier dinner.New data from OpenTable shows there’s been an 11% increase in 6pm bookings in London, and a 6% rise nationally, compared to the year before. Meanwhile a report from Zonal clocked that the UK’s average dinner time is now 6.12pm.“Gen Z are eating dinner at 6pm – and it’s because they’re losers,” reads an Evening Standard opinion piece, which nods to the fact young people seem to be driving the trend for an earlier dinner. But are Gen Z actually onto something with their 6pm dining habits? Scientists think so.When is the best time to eat dinner?From a longevity perspective, Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, previously told GQ there’s no set hour to stop eating – it’s more to do with when your bedtime is.He suggested we should stop eating three hours before bedtime, because eating any later can disrupt our sleep (poor sleep, especially in middle age, has been linked to conditions like dementia), and may change how our body burns energy.So if you go to bed at 10pm (hi, hello, it’s me), then really you should be aiming to have finished eating by 7pm – meaning a 6pm dinnertime isn’t so terrible. Longo added that the longest-living people he’s tracked stopped eating 12 hours before breakfast the following day.Say you’re an eight-hour sleeper; that might mean you stop eating four hours before you sleep and have breakfast immediately on waking, or that you stop eating three hours before sleep and wait an hour after waking to have breakfast.If you want to maintain a healthy weight, a study by Harvard Medical School suggested eating dinner at 5pm is the magic time. Those who ate their last meal of the day at this time were less hungry compared to people who had dinner at 9pm, scientists said, meaning they were less prone to overeating.It was also linked to positive changes in activity levels relating to certain genes, meaning the body was less likely to store fat.Of course, lots of us are still working at 5pm (or commuting, or busy), in which case, registered dietitian Tracy Lockwood Beckerman, suggested 6-8pm is the sweet dinnertime spot. “Any time between 6 and 8pm is an ‘ideal’ dinnertime,” she previously told HuffPost. “That’s because it gives the average person enough time to digest before hitting the hay around 10 or 11pm.”Going by all of this, I think Gen Z are the real winners here. Related...I Tried Hundreds Of 'Quick' Dinners – These 3 Actually Take Less Than 15 MinutesI Tried Nigella Lawson's 15-Minute Lemon Tuna Pasta, And It's The Perfect Weekday DinnerI Make This Breakfast And Lunch On Loop To Get 24g Fibre Before Dinner

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