It’s not only what you eat that matters – your body clock plays an important role in how you metabolise food.
“Have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have dinner like a pauper,” my Spanish friend and colleague Javier Hirschfeld told me when I asked about typical Spanish eating habits. It’s a saying that has been drilled into him from an early age.
In Spain, it’s common for lunch to be your biggest meal of the day while evening meals tend to consist of light bites. “Some people skip dinner altogether or have a piece of fruit and yoghurt,” he says.
In the UK and US, it’s more usual to have a light lunch followed by a bigger meal in the evening. But we may have got things backwards – that’s according to an emerging scientific discipline, chrononutrition. It suggests that healthy eating is not only about what we eat, but also when we eat it.
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