Now the 9 to 5 diet?

This wasn’t a big news story last week, but it was an interesting one. The Mail, as is often the case, was one of the few papers to pick up a recent journal article about mice feeding experiments. Their headline was “Want to lose weight? Eat all your food in an eight-hour time frame - and NEVER snack at night”.

The study

The study was undertaken in California. The supervising researcher was called Satchin Panda and the article can be seen in full here. The headlines are here. The really fun bits (the numbers) are here. For once I really don’t recommend checking out the full article. It took me hours to work out all the TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations) and I’m still not entirely sure what FAA vs. FSA vs. FST vs. FTA is all about.

The bottom line is that lots of experiments were undertaken on lots of mice (392). There were between 8 and 16 mice for each experiment, so we’re not talking big numbers here.

Two of the diets were (there was also a normal chow diet for some comparator experiments)

-      The FS (Fat/Sucrose) diet, which comprised: 32% of calories from fat; 25% sucrose; 26% other carbohydrate; and 17% protein.

-      The FR (Fructose) diet, which comprised: 13% of calories from fat; 60% from sucrose; 7% other carbohydrate; and 20% protein.

And this was what was found:

 

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