It’s a tempting thought that we could all be healthier and even lose weight without changing what we eat at all – just WHEN we eat it.

Experiments with rats and mice have shown that moving their feeding times closer together in the day – and so giving them a longer period overnight when they were ‘fasting’, or not eating, made them lose weight and have healthier blood sugar and cholesterol levels – even when they were eating exactly the same food and number of calories.

But no one had done a similar (controlled and randomised) study with people – so we teamed up with the University of Surrey to try.