{"id":3933,"date":"2024-01-12T11:06:49","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T16:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dailycupofwellness\/?p=3933"},"modified":"2024-01-12T11:06:49","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T16:06:49","slug":"how-to-calculate-the-best-dinner-time-for-your-sleep-health-and-family-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dailycupofwellness\/2024\/01\/how-to-calculate-the-best-dinner-time-for-your-sleep-health-and-family-time.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Calculate the Best Dinner Time For Your Sleep, Health, and Family Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our grandparents may have been onto something with those early-bird dinners. The best time to eat the evening meal is four hours before bedtime. According to a statistician who analyzed time-use data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in America, dinnertime is 6:19 p.m., but it varies from a little after 5 p.m. to after 8 p.m., depending on the part of the country.<\/p>\n

Nutritionists vary on when dinner should be served but agree that it should be at least two hours before bedtime. The most critical factor in the dinnertime calculus is melatonin, the hormone that signals it\u2019s time to sleep, says Satchidananda Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.<\/p>\n

Melatonin, which starts to rise about three hours before we go to bed, also tells the pancreas to cut back on insulin production. If we have a sugar spike after eating late, our body has a more challenging time regulating blood sugar, Panda says. This could put us at risk of diabetes and other metabolic disorders. For that reason, he says the ideal dinnertime is three to four hours before bed.\u00a0What we eat for dinner matters, too. Slower-digesting food like meat keeps us full longer.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly in the last hundred years have we seen easily digestible,\u00a0highly processed food,\u201d Panda says, explaining that nearly 70 percent of the calories we eat now come from carbohydrates. The modern American diet makes timing your family dinners even more critical. Late-night eating can cause the body to store more fat and reduce levels of leptin, the hormone that tells your brain when you\u2019re full, according to a\u00a02022 study<\/a>\u00a0from researchers at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital in Boston and the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n