Eating at the right hour: what chrono-nutrition brought back

There is an idea that seems obvious once it is spoken, and that took a long time to return: that the moment at which we eat matters as much as what we eat.

What was proposed

In 1986, Dr Alain Delabos developed what he would call chrono-nutrition, published by Albin Michel in a book that has been reprinted many times.

The principle is to distribute food categories according to the moments of the day, based on the idea that the body does not receive them in the same way at every hour.

We take no position on the method itself, which belongs to its author and has its own debates. What interests us lies elsewhere: the fact that a French practitioner built an entire system on a variable — the moment — that classical nutrition treated as secondary.

What chronobiology has documented elsewhere

The ground had been prepared. Franz Halberg coined the term “circadian” in 1959, and he worked with Alain Reinberg, in France, to establish that the body’s functions follow their own rhythms.

The skin is among the subjects studied: its permeability, its activity, its response are not identical at every hour. It is a documented field, and it vindicates a very old intuition — that the hour of the gesture matters.

What traditions made of this idea

They went one step further, and that is what makes the comparison interesting.

They did not only regulate the moment: they also regulated the recipient. Reading by flavours, within the framework of the five movements, associates each register with a taste — sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, salty — and considers that a flavour nourishes one nature and unbalances another.

Two people seated at the same table, at the same moment, therefore do not receive the same meal in the same way.

It is a less convenient idea than a shared timetable, and that is probably why it has circulated less.

The common ground of both approaches

They refuse the single recommendation.

One refuses it in time: what suits the morning does not suit the evening. The other refuses it according to the person: what nourishes one unbalances another.

Both go against the prevailing idea of the twentieth century, which was that there is one good general answer and that it is enough to find it.

What to take from this

That the missing variable is almost never the food. It is the context: when, and for whom.

The “when” is now documented and discussed. The “for whom” is far less so, because it presupposes knowing to which logic a person belongs.

This information cannot be deduced from a timetable or a diet. It precedes both, and it can be read from the very beginning.