According to the study, my eating window could be twice as wide as optimal, which means I imagine that if some of you eat as I do when I do, your back sides and bellies would get bigger and bigger. And the study could mean that only excessive exercise has kept the Fitness Master from becoming the Fatness Disaster.

Or the study could mean that a theory I developed almost 30 years ago is so spot on that I should've devoted all my energy to nutritional research.Regardless, it's rare that a single study provides the impetus for what could be two month's worth of columns (I'll limit myself to a total of two, however) so first and foremost you need to know about what actually occurred at the Salk Institute.In an attempt to get greater insight into the obesity epidemic in 2012, Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor at Salk Institute, tried this: he fed mice a high-fat diet, but half of the mice consumed all their calories every day inside an eight-hour window. The other group consumed the same number of calories without any time-of-day restriction.Ultimately, those consuming all their cals inside an eight-hour window gained less weight and fared far better in blood-work tests to ascertain general health.As a result of these results, the Salk Institute did a follow-up study, the results of which were published last December in Cell Metabolism and are still creating a buzz. That's because not only did the second study confirm the first study's findings, but it also did so when the eight-hour-eating window was expanded.In this study, the researchers took 392 male lab mice some obese, some of normal weight, and all beginning the human equivalent of young adulthood fed them the same number of calories a day, but altered the time frame of the eating windows as well as the composition of the diets. Expectedly, the mice allowed to eat as much food high in both sugar and fat whenever they wanted gained the most weight.But the mice allowed to eat as much as they wanted of the high sugar, high-fat feed but for only nine hours a day only gained half as much weight even though the calories both groups consumed by both groups each day were comparable.Think about that again. Two groups eat bad stuff to their heart's content, but the one group only does so between, let's say, 9:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., and as a result, that group only gains half as much weight in 38 weeks.Do you see why this research even though it hasn't yet been attempted with humans has caused such a buzz? It suggests that weight gain or weight loss is concurrently controlled by three factors totally calories consumed, composition of those cals (whether protein, carbs, or fat), and the time or times of consumption though the degree to which is still a mystery.The two studies have clearly demonstrated that the time of calorie consumption affects weight gain significantly, but the second study showed that the window is not as tight as first believed.For in the second study whether the window for the mice eating all they want of the bad stuff was set at nine, 10, or 12 hours, the reduced weight still gain remained close to the same and far less than the any-time-of-the-day group.Only when the window was expanded to 15 hours a day did the recorded weight gain approximate the amount registered by the mice eating as much of the bad stuff as they want any time of the day.Next, the researchers took some of the mice who gained weight by eating the bad stuff whenever and restricted their access of food to a nine-hour window. Once again, the number of calories consumed really didn't change between that group and the any-time-of-the-day group, yet by the end of the 38-week study, the mice who changed groups midway gained 25 percent less weight overall than the mice who remained on the bad-stuff-any-time-of-the-day diet.An additional note of interest: restricting the feeding window led to health benefits in mice even when the mice consumed diet more typical of a mouse. In this situation, however, the big difference didn't occur in weight gained or lost, but the weight's composition.The mice who ate a normal mouse diet for a limited amount time throughout the day developed less body fat and more muscle mass than those allowed to eat whenever.One final note: when the researchers allowed the mice eating for a limited number of hours during the day to eat whenever they wanted two days of the week what many naturally people do on weekends the results did not change significantly.For the greater implications in all this, read the column next week.