A Late Meal Timing Pattern Is Associated with Insulin Resistance in European Children and Adolescents

Meal timing has been associated with metabolic markers in adults, but not in children or adolescents. The aim of this study was to investigate associations of meal timing patterns (MTPs) with insulin resistance (IR) and triglyceride levels in children and adolescents. In this cross-sectional study, we included 2,195 participants aged 8–15 years from the European I.Family study (2013/14). Habitual diet exposures were derived using 24-hr dietary recalls and HOMA-IR, HbA1c, and triglycerides were used as metabolic outcome variables. We applied k-means cluster analysis on five dietary exposures (energy proportion in the morning and evening, eating window, pre-sleep fasting and eating frequency), which revealed the following three MTPs: “early-often”, “late-long” and “late-infrequent-short”. We used linear mixed models to estimate the associations between MTPs and the z-scores of the metabolic outcome variables. The association analysis revealed differences between MTPs in HOMA-IR but not in HbA1c or triglyceride z-scores. The “late-infrequent-short” pattern was associated with a 0.19 (95%-CI: (0.01, 0.36)) higher HOMA-IR z-score compared to the “early-often” pattern in the model adjusted for age, BMI z-score, education, sex, country, and family membership. These findings suggest that the timing of meals may influence IR already in childhood and adolescence. Therefore, the time of meals should be considered in future nutrition research and dietary advice for children and adolescents.