Couple having breakfast in garden. Photo: A. Green (Getty)
From here on out, it’s a 9 A.M. dinner for me.
Researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain are fairly confident “people who eat dinner before 9 P.M. — or at least two hours before going to sleep — have a 20 percent lower risk of breast and prostate cancer than those who eat after 10 P.M. or go to bed shortly after supper.”
That’s great news for people like my parents, who used to pull me off the baseball diamond away from my friends so I could eat a subpar meatloaf dinner at 4:30 P.M. Then it was off to stay awake for another six hours.
“What we know from experimental studies is that we are conditioned to function in different parts of the day,” lead author Dr. Manolis Kogevinas said. “We — not only humans but all living organisms — have developed throughout time functioning differently in day and night.”
And if you thought this latest revelation was hard to swallow: Study Claims There Is No Limit To How Long Humans Can Live
Researchers came to their conclusions after studying lifestyles, eating habits and sleeping habits. Specifically, they tested 621 people who had prostate cancer and 1,205 who had breast cancer. In addition, 872 male and 1,321 female patients without cancer were inspected. It didn’t matter that seven percent of them said they had a cookie or bowl of ice cream while watching Family Guy reruns later that evening. The study focused solely on full meals. If some of those meals happened to come after 10 P.M., it apparently means those people should expect to get screwed by cancer later in life.
