A Descriptive Analysis of the Association Between the Duration of Eating Interval Over the Course of the Day, Diet Quality, and Clinical Cardiometabolic Health in NHANES 2015-2016

There is little population level descriptive evidence on the association between the duration of eating interval over the course of the day with diet quality and clinical cardiometabolic health measures. A cross-sectional analysis using data from The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2015-2016 included 3848 adults (aged 20–79) who underwent medical examination and had two days of dietary data based on 24h dietary recall. Diet quality was measured using the Health Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015). Clinical cardiometabolic measures included total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, triglycerides, TG/HDL-c ratio, fasting glucose, glycohemoglobin, insulin, OGTT, HOMA-IR, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, BMI and sagittal abdominal diameter. Eating duration was defined as the time period between the beginning of the first and the last eating episodes of the day and was divided into 6 intervals (<8hr, 8-9:59hr, 10-11:59hr, 12-13:59hr, 14-15:59hr, 16+hr). Analyses were carried out using multiple linear regression with adjustment for major confounders. Participants had higher diet quality with longer duration of eating over the course of the day from <8 hr to 15.59 hr and participants with a 16+ hr eating duration had lower diet quality. Duration of eating over the course of the day and diet quality were influenced by breakfast habits, smoking habits, and family-income to poverty ratio. Additionally, clinical cardiometabolic risk measures also varied according to duration of eating over the course of the day, with particularly worse glycemic-related measures for people with diabetes with longer duration