Franco Berrino: “Having light dinners or skipping one a week: because it’s good for you”

“Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a poor man.” We have known this for thousands of years. He’s a proverb that dates back to Ayurvedic medicine and which returns in more or less modified forms in all cultures. It is so obvious: in the morning we need to eat foods that give us energy to work, at lunch too, but in the evening it is better to eat little not to go to bed with an undigested meal. There is no need to eat if you don’t work at night. Food energy that is not consumed by physical work ends up accumulating in our body in the form of fats.
A clinical trial conducted in Israel showed that a light dinner helps you lose weight. About sixty slightly overweight ladies were randomized (distributed by lot) into two groups, both with a slightly low-calorie diet, a group that ate a large breakfast and a very light dinner and one that ate a very light breakfast and a large dinner. The lunch was the same. They ate exactly the same things in the same quantity, but differently distributed throughout the day. The former have lost weight, the latter have not. Skipping dinner, or having an early and light dinner, is a very important safeguard for health.
Unfortunately, in modern society, dinner has often become the main meal of the day. In the morning, you are too in a hurry to prepare a good breakfast. At lunch she is at work with a short break and has something to eat at the bar. At dinner the family gets together and there is time to share the pleasure of eating. That’s no good. Even at night you shouldn’t eat. If we feed laboratory rats during the day, which eat at night, they gain weight. If we humans eat at night, we get fat. A light dinner regulates our metabolism.
Another trial comparing light dinner with light breakfast was conducted on girls with polycystic ovaries, an increasingly frequent condition that causes infertility and often hirsutism and overweight with ungainly fat distribution. The light dinner normalized all fertility parameters. Skipping dinner is also advisable for cancer patients. In a large study that recruited over two thousand patients operated on for breast cancer, they were asked to fill in food diaries, also marking the time when meals were eaten. Half of these women spent at least 14 hours between the last meal of the day and breakfast the next morning, half less than 14 hours. The former had significantly fewer fatal relapses of the disease.

What happens in our body when we skip dinner? Probably many things, but certainly one of the most important is that your blood sugar goes down. More studies have shown that those with high blood sugar, even within the range considered normal, get more sick from various types of cancer, particularly breast cancer and colon cancer, and that patients with high blood sugar have worse prognosis. Cancer cells, in order to survive and multiply, have an enormous need for glucose, 20-30 times more than normal cells, and if the blood sugar is low they are in difficulty. If you skip dinner, your blood sugar during the night can drop by as much as 20%. With fasting, the plasma concentration of growth factors is also reduced, the factors that make children grow but which, when we have grown up, also favor the growth of tumors. All religious cultures have recommended more or less long periods of fasting, from Islam which prescribes fasting from sunrise to sunset in the month of Ramadan to Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus who prescribe fasting on certain days of the week or year, to the long fasts of Native American sacred ceremonies. But man has always fasted even regardless of religions, simply because when we were hunter-gatherers we did not always find food. Our physiology is designed to withstand fasting, indeed, to maintain high levels of cognitive functions in the event of food shortages. If there is no food, in fact, it is good that the mind is clear in looking for food. Multiple studies have shown that fasting periods (so-called intermittent fasting) in laboratory animals reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Fasting can also help reduce chronic inflammation which predisposes to the development of all chronic diseases, including cancer. In the seminars of the ‘Happy Longevity’ organized by La Grande Via, in the first week we skip a dinner, in the second week we skip lunch and dinner (24 hours of fasting) and in the third week we skip breakfast, lunch and dinner (36 hours of fasting). It is a good rule, which we could apply in normal life.

Read also:

– Franco Berrino, the 27 rules for losing weight and rejuvenating
– The 7 foods that are best avoided according to Franco Berrino
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– Franco Berrino and Valter Longo: the 16 definitive rules for losing weight and living long
– Franco Berrino, biscuits with few ingredients that do not raise blood sugar