Imagine you have prediabetes, a condition where your blood sugar is high but not yet diabetes. You might wonder if the time you eat matters. A new review looked at 297 adults with this condition, averaging age 59 and a BMI of 31.3. They compared people who started eating later versus those who ate earlier.
The study found that for every hour people delayed their first meal, their fasting insulin went up. Insulin is the hormone your body uses to move sugar from your blood into your cells. Later eating also raised insulin levels two hours after a meal and increased total body fat. However, the study did not find a link between meal timing and visceral fat or liver fat.
These findings come from an observational study, which means researchers watched what happened without controlling every detail. They found a strong link between later eating and worse blood sugar markers, but they cannot say that eating later causes these changes. The results suggest that eating earlier might support better glucose metabolism, but more research is needed to confirm this.
Funding for this work came from German research organizations focused on nutrition and diabetes. The study highlights that when you eat could be just as important as what you eat for people managing prediabetes.