Research

Hormonal

Early time-restricted feeding (eTRF), defined as an 8-hour eating window between 06:00 and 15:00, significantly improves insulin sensitivity, reduces fasting glucose, lowers body mass and adiposity, and reduces inflammation in healthy non-obese adults compared to ad libitum eating.

If you are healthy and not obese, try eating all your meals within an 8-hour window that ends by 3 PM (e.g., 7 AM to 3 PM). You do not need to count calories or restrict food types, just the timing. This specific timing window has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity and reduce body fat more effectively than eating later in the day or eating whenever you want.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
We found that eTRF was associated with a larger improvement in insulin sensitivity than mTRF, and eTRF, but not mTRF, was associated with lower fasting plasma glucose, body mass, adiposity, and inflammation; and a more diverse gut microbiota than the control group.
Zhibo Xie et al. · Nature Communications · 2022

Why this rating

Randomized controlled trial with 82 completers, but small sample size (n=28 per group) and lack of blinding for participants.

Source

Randomized controlled trial for time-restricted eating in healthy volunteers without obesity

Zhibo Xie et al. · Nature Communications · 2022

DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-28662-5

rct · n=90Cited 263×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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