Older women who restricted their daily food intake to across roughly eight or nine hours showed modest improvements in certain thinking skills compared with those who ate across a longer period, even though both groups lost similar amounts of weight, according to preliminary results from a small U.S. clinical trial presented Sunday.
Researchers at Rutgers University enrolled 47 women ages 50 to 79 who were overweight or obese in a six-month weight loss program.
All participants received counseling to cut about 500 calories from their daily diets.
Twenty-six of them were also instructed to eat only within a window of less than nine hours each day, typically between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Their average eating period was 8.2 hours.
The remaining women continued with a more conventional schedule averaging 12.3 hours.
