It’s common to feel a little off right now. Doctors say that the colder months are a good time to rethink your evening routine—the best time to eat dinner included. And when you eat can be almost as important as what you eat, especially in the winter.
If you feel like you’re doing just fine or can’t handle any more change in your life right now, that’s fair. But if you can’t shake the feeling that you’re driving the struggle bus, tweaking the timing of your last meal of the day is worth considering. While it won’t magically turn things around, there are a few reasons to think about adjusting that dinnertime. Here’s what doctors shared about the best time to eat dinner.
Why should you adjust dinnertime in the winter?
It’s important to get this out of the way upfront: There are no studies that clearly spell out that you should adjust your dinnertime in the winter. “But, there is a lot of indirect evidence that points in this direction,” Ashkan Farhadi, MD, a gastroenterologist at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA, tells Vogue.
A lot of this comes down to your circadian rhythm, Dr. Farhadi says. This is your body’s internal 24-hour clock, and it influences a lot of different elements of your health, Christopher Winter, MD, a sleep medicine specialist, neurologist, and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It, says. “Your circadian rhythm and circadian factors influence when you fall asleep and wake up, and also have massive implications for your overall health,” he says.
As part of your circadian rhythm, your body begins to produce melatonin, a hormone that helps to regulate sleep, when it starts to get dark out, Dr. Winter explains. (This is part of the reason why you may feel sleepier earlier in the winter months.)
If you’ve leaned into that and are going to bed earlier than you were before, Dr. Winter says it’s a good idea to bump up your dinnertime to make sure you’re still working with your circadian rhythm. “Everything we do—particularly body movement, exposure to light, and eating—are all little cues that our body uses to understand where we are in time,” he says. “When you have dinner is a cue.”
If you tend to eat dinner at the same time every night, but your bedtime has shifted to be earlier, it can throw your sleep out of whack, Dr. Winter says. “In addition to there being more food in your stomach when you get into bed, which is not great for sleep, you’re cuing your body for the later bedtime it’s used to, but you’ve moved up that bedtime,” he says. “It’s disorienting and can be a primer for insomnia.”
Shabnam Sarker, MD, an assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, agrees. “Eating earlier in the day is generally better for overall health, as it aligns with the natural circadian rhythm,” she explains. “It has been associated with improvement in cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity and diabetes.”
That earlier melatonin production can directly impact your gut too, Dr. Farhadi says. “When it’s nighttime, melatonin signals to the gut that it’s time to slow down,” he says. So your gut is winding down earlier than it did before, and you might be slipping into bed a little earlier. What you don’t want to do is to go to bed with a full stomach—this can cause uncomfortable gastrointestinal issues like reflux and general discomfort, Dr. Farhadi says.
What is the best time to eat dinner in the winter?
As you can imagine, it’s hard to put a blanket recommendation out there that everyone should eat at the exact same time in the winter. Still, science has dropped a few clues about a general timeframe.
A study published in the journal Cell Metabolism in 2022 found that people who eat at 9p.m. have higher levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin, which signals to the body that it’s time to eat, compared to those who eat at 5p.m. So if you eat late, you may feel hungrier. The researchers concluded that eating between 5p.m. and 7p.m. was a solid choice for people who wanted to manage their weight—or, who just didn’t want to go to bed feeling hungry.
Another study, this one published in the journal Nutrients, found that eating dinner around 6 p.m. can support more stable blood sugar levels compared to people who ate at 9 p.m. That ultimately can help lower the risk of developing conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
But there’s more to consider: In a perfect world, you’d eat your last meal three to four hours before bed. “We usually recommend making dinner the lightest meal of the day and to avoid eating three to four hours before bedtime,” Dr. Sarker says. (That’s most important to patients who have issues with reflux, she says, but Dr. Winter notes that this is also important to support good sleep.) There is also research to suggest that eating most of your calories earlier in the day can help improve the stability of your blood sugar and support good metabolic health.
Factoring all of that in, it seems like the best time to eat dinner is between 5p.m. and 6p.m., depending on when you go to bed. Still, everyone is different. “This would vary greatly among individuals, including their lifestyle and metabolic health,” Dr. Sarker says.
Again, if you feel like you’re just not falling into a good rhythm with this time change, it’s worth readjusting your dinnertime. “Take this time to evaluate your consistency and timing with meals,” Dr. Winter says.