Man eating
A man takes a bite from a hot dog in Hollywood, California October 3, 2007. Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

Contrary to popular belief, an average person’s daily meal does not only consist of breakfast, lunch and dinner, a new study reveals. Using a smartphone application, researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that people snack for a significant period of their waking hours eating random items. The team believes their findings could lead to weight loss and health improvement by restricting eating time for a shorter number of hours per day.

In the study, which appeared in the journal Cell Metabolism, the researchers observed that the average time between a person’s first bite of breakfast and last bite of dinner is 14 hours and 45 minutes. For people following this eating habit, limiting daily food consumption to a smaller window of time is potentially a very simple intervention to get healthier, claims the study’s co-author Satchidananda Panda, an obesity researcher at the Salk Institute's Regulatory Biology Laboratory in California, in an interview with Live Science.

While majority of studies investigating food consumption rely on diary reports, the team did not require participants of such research to record everything they eat. Since Panda and his team wanted to know about every single morsel consumed by people, they instead developed a smartphone app that works a bit like Snapchat of food.

For the study, the researchers asked 156 people to take pictures of everything they ate or drank before consuming it. The photos were immediately sent to a central server to collect the data and were automatically deleted from the participants' phones so they would not have a visual record that might make them change their eating habits.

To ensure that the participants’ report are complete, the team designed the app to be user-friendly and employed push notifications to send reminders about photographing food. The scientists estimated that participants forgot to take photos of what they ate only 10 percent of the time.

Based on the photos collected, the team observed that participants did not follow a standard pattern of breakfast, lunch and dinner and instead had three to 10 “eating events” per day, which meant anything from a snack to a full meal. The researchers also found that people also ate just a little too much, consuming around 2,000 calories a day, which is about 23 percent more than the estimated average amount needed to maintain their weight.

The researchers, who went beyond simply monitoring food consumption, asked eight overweight but otherwise healthy participants to pick a 10- to 12-hour stretch of the day for seven days and restrict their entire caloric intake to just that stretch. After 16 weeks of conducting this experiment, the participants reduced their calorie intake by about 20 percent and lost an average of 7.2 pounds.

The lower calorie intake may have happened because the participants tend to stick to certain consumption patterns, Panda says. He claims that if people choose to limit their food consumption for a period of 10 to 12 hours, the timing of that window might determine which foods they cut out. For example, he cites, an earlier window might lead to drinking less alcohol. Panda says, however, that there are other factors to consider, such as the link between diet and circadian rhythm.

Panda and his team hope to expand their study to wider swathes of the population, especially since other researchers are interested in replicating the study in Europe, India and Japan. The app is now available for iPhone and Android users, and is now updated to provide feedback on the user's diet.

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