A new study reveals that people's eating habit is not boxed in on the usual breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Live Science reported that the study done by Satchidananda Panda, an obesity researcher at the Salk Institute's Regulatory Biology Laboratory in California, reveals that people snack all the time.
"[It's] not only that people don't eat three meals a day. They also eat very random items and random combinations of items, for example, [a] cream-cheese-Cheeto sandwich [or] rice crispy with spicy trail mix. People are very creative."
The app that was used for the study is called myCircadianClock that works like a snapchat, only for the purposes of food tracking. There were 156 people who participated in the study where they were instructed to take a photo of everything they ate or drank before consuming it.
"The pictures were immediately sent to a central server to collect the data, but the photos were also automatically deleted from the users' phones, so they wouldn't have a visual record that might trigger them to change their eating habits," Live Science explains.
One interesting result to note is that people eat majority of their waking hours and that's amounting to 14 hours and 45 minutes as reported in the journal Cell Metabolism. The photos from the participants also revealed that there are no standard pattern of breakfast, lunch and dinner. "Instead, people had "eating events" (anything from a snack to a full meal) that ranged in number from three to 10 daily, on average. The scientists estimated that people forgot to snap photos of what they ate only 10 percent of the time."
The implication of these findings will help dietician and health professionals develop an easy way to improve weight and health conditions by limiting food consumption to a smaller window, Panda explained.
