A Longevity Expert On When To Actually Eat Dinner

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP, is ready to settle the debate once and for all: When is the best time to eat dinner? “It’s certainly not at 9 p.m. at night,” the CEO of nutri-tech company L-Nutra jokes after we bonded about our common Arab heritage and the culture’s love of late-night dining.

“When you eat late at night, your body isn’t fully resting while you sleep,” Dr. Antoun shares. “You may not notice it, but your digestive system is working and you aren’t getting into REM sleep. Eating late at night means you might have micro wake-ups from things like acid reflux. And when you’re not sleeping well, you’re not hitting a very important longevity metric.”

So when it comes to dinner, Dr. Antoun says the earlier the better, with one important caveat: You want to have a 12-hour space between your last bite at night and your first bite of breakfast the next day. This practice is a form of intermittent fasting called “front-end intermittent fasting,” where most of your calories are consumed during the daylight or at the beginning of your day, tapering off toward bedtime.

“When interviewing centenarians, one of the most common things we found wasn’t that they eat healthy, it’s that they eat an early dinner,” Dr. Antoun says. They don’t stay out late or eat a late-night dinner or drinks. The next day, they always have breakfast, but there’s been a 12-hour space between their meals—whether or not it’s intentional, it’s 12 hours of intermittent fasting.” And for anybody who has tried fasting before, it’s much easier to do when you’re dreaming.

Dr. Antoun is filled with other fantastic pieces of longevity advice, including this gem that I’m quite guilty of: “Don’t skip breakfast, that’s the worst thing you can do.”