Does time-restricted eating in children improve metabolic health?

Theme Diet and physical activity

Workstream Population diet and physical activity

Status: This project is ongoing

This project will explore whether time-restricted eating can improve metabolic health in children. Time-restricted eating involves eating all your meals during a specific time window without focusing on the number of calories you eat during that window. Metabolic health is a term we use to describe how well a person generates and processes energy in their body.

During this project we aim to:

  • Establish average eating windows of children and adolescents
  • Investigate associations between eating windows and metabolic health in children and adolescents
  • Establish the feasibility of a time-limited eating intervention in UK children living with overweight or obesity

We hope to use the findings from this project to apply for funding for a pilot study of a time-limited eating intervention to improve metabolic health in childhood. We hope that this pilot study may lead to a full-scale trial.

This PhD project is being undertaken by Jill Townley, as lead researcher, with Dr Sam Leary, Dr Kate Northstone, Dr Ella Hinton and Professor Julian Hamilton-Shield providing supervision.