Dinners have been blamed for what has spawned our opulence: an epidemic of overweight and obesity. Why have we blamed the last meal of the day for making us fat? I cannot answer for sure, but it is probably due to several things:

1. Analytical and wrong thinking in physiology: “If you eat a lot and go to sleep, you don’t burn it and it accumulates as fat.”
2. Due to the high levels of work stress and daily work, dinner becomes the great dopamine releaser in our brain. It is when we look for the reward to a bad day, through a great pizza, a little wine or a great dessert.
3. Eating dinner too late. This is a factor that can affect our health or body weight. Nowadays we know that ingesting most of the calories in the daylight hours and not at night can have some impact on it. But even so, it will always be a secondary factor to what is more important: calories and nutritional quality of food.

In a recent study, two groups are divided into two groups that ingest the same amount of calories and nutrients daily. They eat 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). The only difference is that one group eats more at breakfast and the other more at dinner. Result: both groups lose the same amount of weight (image 2). 

However, as other studies show, those who ate the most calories at breakfast were less hungry the rest of the day. This is probably due to the effect of protein at breakfast. Many studies already confirm that high protein breakfasts reduce appetite during the rest of the day.

One thing that is certain is that eating too much can be indigestible and cause digestive problems during the night for some people. In these cases, it is better to reduce the amount of food in the evening.