Putin: Kim conditionally ready to denuclearize

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VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (AP) — The Latest on the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (all times local): 8:40 p.m. South Korea's president says he believes the Russia-North Korean summit will have a "constructive role" in efforts to achieve complete denuclearization and lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.

(1 of 9) Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un pose for photographers during their meeting in Vladivostok, Russia, Thursday, April 25, 2019. President Putin opened his talks with Kim, saying that Russia would like to help support efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff. (Yuri Kadobnov/Pool Photo via AP)

April 25, 2019

In a statement, President Moon Jae-in's office said he hoped Thursday's summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will "lay a foundation for the resumption of North Korea-U.S. talks and the promotion of denuclearization process on the Korean Peninsula."

Moon also praised Putin's efforts to resolve the nuclear issue diplomatically, and he invited Putin to visit South Korea. Moon made the comments during a meeting with vising top Russian security official Nikolai Patrushev.

Patrushev responded Russia and South Korea share the common goal of realizing denuclearization and peace on the peninsula.

8 p.m.

President Vladimir Putin says after talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Pyongyang is ready to proceed toward denuclearization, but that it needs serious security guarantees to do so.

Putin said after Thursday's talks with the North Korean leader in Vladivostok that he's ready to share details from the summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, saying that "there are no secrets."

He added that Kim himself encouraged him to explain the nuances of Pyongyang's stance if he talks to Trump about the talks.

Putin noted that Russia and the U.S. both want North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons, but he emphasized that North Korea wants strong security guarantees to proceed on that path. He didn't specify what the guarantees should be, but says they should likely be underwritten by multiple countries.

6:50 p.m.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un says he had "candid and meaningful" talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about how to promote peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the region.

Kim said at the start of his dinner banquet with Putin in Vladivostok before making a toast: "The people of the two countries who share a valuable friendship that was created and strengthened while overcoming every hardship and challenge thrown to us by history have a deep understanding that the ceaseless development of North Korea-Russia ties not only serves our mutual interests but is also indispensable for securing the region's peace and stability."

He also says that the people of North Korea "always have affectionate and brotherly emotions about the people of Russia and feel pride that a great country like Russia is a close neighbor."

6:15 p.m.

A top Russian security official is holding talks in South Korea while the Russian president is meeting with the North Korean leader.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, arrived in Seoul on Thursday for talks with top South Korean security officials. The Security Council said in a statement that Patrushev would discuss ties with South Korea as well as international terrorism and drug trafficking.

There was no mention of North Korea's nuclear problem, even though Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier on Thursday sat down for a rare summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Russia's Vladivostok.

4:15 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un say they have had fruitful talks about how to defuse a standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program.

The two leaders spoke after their one-on-one meeting Thursday as they sat down for broader negotiations involving top officials from both sides on the Russky Island near Vladivostok.

Putin said he and Kim "exchanged opinions about what should be done to improve the situation." Kim noted that they had "discussed ways of peaceful settlement" and had "a very fruitful exchange."

Kim's first trip to Russia comes about two months after his second summit with President Donald Trump failed because of disputes over U.S.-led sanctions on the North. Putin meanwhile wants to expand Russia's clout in the region and get more leverage with Washington.

2:20 p.m.

President Vladimir Putin has opened his talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying that Russia would like to help support efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff.

Putin told Kim on Thursday that Russia supports his efforts to normalize North Korea's relations with the United States.

He added that the talks should help better understand what Russia could do to support negotiations.

Kim congratulated Putin on winning another six-year term in last year's election.

He noted that their talks will give a chance to exchange views on the situation on the Korean Peninsula.

2 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have shaken hands before heading to talks at a university in Russia's far-eastern city of Vladivostok.

TV coverage showed Kim arriving in a limousine before shaking hands with Putin. Putin smiled and gestured to Kim before they both walked inside the building.

Putin then introduced Kim to Russian officials who shook his hand.

Thursday's summit reflects Russia's effort to position itself as an essential player in the North Korean nuclear standoff.

Kim's first trip to Russia comes about two months after his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, which failed because of disputes over U.S.-led sanctions on the North.

12:30 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Vladivostok for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Thursday's summit reflects Russia's effort to position itself as an essential player in the North Korean nuclear standoff.

Kim's first trip to Russia comes about two months after his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, which failed because of disputes over U.S.-led sanctions on the North.

Putin and Kim are set to have one-on-one meeting at the Far Eastern State University on the Russky Island across a bridge from Vladivostok. The meeting will be followed by broader talks involving officials from both sides.

Kim arrived Wednesday in Vladivostok on his armored train, saying upon arrival that he's hoping for a "successful and useful" visit.

France's Macron vows to cut middle-class taxes

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PARIS (AP) — The Latest on French President Emmanuel Macron's solutions to quell the economic anger of yellow vest protests(all times local): 6:50 p.m. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to cut income taxes for middle-class workers.

(1 of 2) Yellow Vests protesters march on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris. France's yellow vest protesters remain a force to be reckoned with five months after their movement started, and as President Emmanuel Macron announces his responses to their grievances. It includes people across political, regional, social and generational divides angry at economic injustice and the way President Emmanuel Macron is running France.

April 25, 2019

Macron made the vow Thursday during a planned speech outlining his response to months of anti-government protests. He said he wants to "cut taxes for a maximum number of citizens and especially those who are working, the middle-class."

Macron said he is considering financing the measure through cuts in public spending and making people work longer before they retire. He didn't elaborate.  

6:35 p.m.

French President Emmanuel wants to reduce the number of lawmakers in parliament and to change the national legislature's voting system so it better reflects the diversity of France's political parties. 

Macron said Thursday during a speech planned to address the concerns raised by the anti-government yellow vest protesters: "We can improve" the parliament and make it "more efficient."

France's parliamentary election system currently is designed to give the winning party a strong majority, disadvantaging smaller parties.

Macron says he wants some of the seats in the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, to be filled through a proportional system.

He said he also plans to make it easier for citizens to propose national referendums.

9 a.m.

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to unveil long-awaited plans to quell five months of yellow vest protests that have damaged his presidency.

Macron will speak to the nation from the Elysee presidential palace after three months of national debate aimed at addressing the protesters' concerns through town hall meetings and collecting complaints online.

He is expected to unveil tax cuts for lower-income households and measures to boost pensions and help single parents. He may also make it easier for ordinary people to initiate local referendums.

While his promises are expected to respond to some demonstrators' grievances, other critics are likely to dismiss them as too little, too late. The protesters see the centrist Macron, a former investment banker, as leading a French government that favors the rich and want more income equality.

Many French protesters say they can't pay their bills due to the high cost of living.

Spain election dominated by uncertainty

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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The outcome of Spain's election on Sunday is anyone's guess. A substantial pool of voters is still undecided. The country's traditional parties have been diluted. And a rising populist party has splintered the right.

(1 of 7) Supporters of Spain's far-right Vox Party wave Spanish and VOX flags during a party event in Leganes, on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain. A substantial pool of undecided voters and a right-wing splintered by a rising populist party are making confident predictions harder to come by as Spain prepares for its third parliamentary election in less than four years.

April 25, 2019

The ballot will be Spain's third parliamentary election in less than four years, with no sign that the uncertainty will go away anytime soon. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is hoping voters give him a strong mandate to stay in the office he assumed 11 months ago, when a no-confidence vote ousted his conservative predecessor. However, about a third of those surveyed heading into the final week of campaigning said they didn't know how they would cast their votes.

The upstart Vox party seems sure to garner enough support to put far-right lawmakers in Spain's lower house, the Congress of Deputies, for the first time since the 1980s. A strong performance by Vox would be crucial to the ability of two center-right parties to forge a majority coalition government to supplant Sánchez.

Sánchez urged voters who abandoned the Socialists in recent years to once again vote for Spain's oldest national party "so that we can stop the three parties on the right from joining forces." If Vox does as well as expected, Spain would have five national parties of significant size. A government opinion poll of 16,194 eligible voters forecast that Sánchez*s Socialists would win 30% of the vote, the conservative Popular Party 17%, the center-right Citizens 13%, the far-left United We Can 12% and Vox 11%.

All the polls published by private news organizations in Spain also forecast Sánchez leading the Socialists to victory for the first time since 2008. "We are very close to seeing the Socialist party winning an election 11 years since its last victory," Sánchez said. "We are very close to being able to offer all Spaniards a prospect of stability, of a country that is walking toward a future of more social justice, more peaceful coexistence and a clean manner of doing politics."

In 2008, the Socialists and their ideological rivals from the Popular Party together accounted for 82% of the vote. The combined vote total for the two parties, which dominated Spanish politics for three decades, fell to 50% in the December 2015 election. In the period in between, the global economic meltdown hit Spain hard and helped give rise to the Citizens party and United We Can.

The fragmentation has made the governments in Madrid much more fragile and short-lived. The current Socialist-led government and the one the Popular Party led from 2016-2018 controlled a minority of parliament seats. Neither accomplished much or came close to seeing out a full four-year legislative term. Sánchez was forced to call this weekend's early election after he was unable to get a national budget passed in February.

"For the foreseeable future in Spain, parties are going to have to establish agreements," said Andrew Dowling, an expert on contemporary Spanish politics at Cardiff University in Wales. "I don't think there's any indication any single party will be able to win. We should remind ourselves that as late as 2004 and 2008, the Socialists were able to get 42 percent of the vote. They're a long way from going back there."

Two nights of televised debates gave the candidates ample time to trade barbs and to try to win over undecided voters. But before the election, there's been more talk about postelection partnerships than about policy platforms.

Pablo Iglesias, the leader of United We Can, was lauded for his moderate tone and defense of the Spanish Constitution during one of the debates, a contrast to his fiery, revolutionary rhetoric during past campaigns. Iglesias has talked openly of wanting to come into government with the Socialists.

Sánchez's ideal scenario would be to cobble together reliable support from 176 of the 350 members of the Congress of Deputies through his Socialists, Iglesias* United We Can and moderate regional lawmakers from the northern Basque Country.

If he can't build a majority that way, Sánchez might find himself again relying on pro-independence lawmakers from the Catalonia region who already proved to be untrustworthy partners. Catalan separatists in parliament voted against the prime minister's national spending bill after Sánchez refused to authorize a referendum on the region's secession from Spain.

The chance of Popular Party leader Pablo Casado becoming prime minister rests on his candidates beating hopefuls from Citizens and then striking a deal with the center-right party to form a coalition government. If Vox representatives agree to support the coalition, the Popular-Citizens government would be able to command a majority of votes in parliament.

Casado, Citizens leader Albert Rivera and Vox leader Santiago Abascal have competed to be seen as tough enough to stand up to the separatist politicians in Catalonia. A failed push to declare the region's independence in 2017 plunged Spain into a deep political crisis.

All three right-wing parties — Popular, Citizens and Vox — accuse Sánchez of being weak on Catalonia because he opened talks with the region's pro-secession leaders. The three parties came together to defeat Sanchez's Socialists during a December election in southern Spain's Andalusia region, long a Socialist stronghold. The Andalusia election introduced Vox to the Spanish political scene. The party campaigned on stemming illegal immigration, protecting Spanish traditions like bullfighting and vows to punish Catalonia by taking over its regional government.

Now the three are competing to see which of them could lead a similar takeover at the national level. "I think what Sunday will decide is who is the winner on the right," Dowling said. "It will be very much a kind of a choice between head and heart for right-wing voters."

Sri Lanka's PM says potential bombers at large

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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka's prime minister said Thursday that suspects linked to the coordinated Easter Sunday bomb attacks remain at large and could have access to explosives. Some of the suspects "may go out for a suicide attack," Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said in an interview with The Associated Press.

(1 of 5) Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe takes a question during an interview with the Associated Press at his office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, April 25, 2019. Wickremesinghe has acknowledged to The Associated Press that minority Ahmadi Muslims who are refugees from Pakistan have faced attacks since the Easter bombings. He said Thursday that security forces were trying to help the Ahmadis.

April 25, 2019

Wickremesinghe spoke frankly about the greatest challenge the South Asian island nation has faced since its civil war ended a decade ago. "This is another experience for us. Not that we are not strangers to terrorism, but this is global terrorism, so we have to ensure that we root this out," he said.

More than 350 people were killed and another 500 people wounded in the string of suicide bombings at churches and luxury hotels in and around the capital, Colombo. The attacks were claimed two days later by the Islamic State group, who posted a video of the man Sri Lankan officials say led the attack with seven others pledging their allegiance to the withered caliphate.

Police, meanwhile, issued a public appeal for information about three women and two men suspected of involvement in the attacks. Wickremesinghe also said that the father of two of the suspected suicide bombers, Colombo spice dealer Mohammad Yusuf Ibrahim, had been arrested. He described him as a leading businessman active in politics known as "Ibrahim Hajiar," a Sri Lankan term for Muslims who have gone on religious pilgrimages to Mecca.

The prime minister expressed doubt about Ibrahim's complicity in the attack. "People like that would not have wanted their sons to blow themselves up," he said. Sri Lankan authorities have blamed a local extremist group, National Towheed Jamaat, whose leader, alternately named Mohammed Zahran or Zahran Hashmi, became known to Muslim leaders three years ago for his incendiary online speeches.

On Wednesday, junior defense minister Ruwan Wijewardene said the attackers had broken away from National Towheed Jamaat and another group, which he identified only as "JMI." Wijewardene said many of the suicide bombers were highly educated and came from well-to-do families.

The prime minister said it appeared that Sri Lanka's wealthiest and best-traveled Muslims were most susceptible to the doctrine professed by the Islamic State group. "They were too educated and therefore, they were misled," Wickremesinghe said.

The bombers were wealthy enough to have financed the entire operation themselves, though they would have needed outside help for training and bomb-building expertise, Wickremsinghe said. He said that authorities still hadn't confirmed whether Zahran, who was supposed to have led one of suicide missions, was among the corpses recovered from the scenes or still at large.

Sri Lanka has been sharply criticized for an apparent intelligence lapse. Government leaders have acknowledged that some intelligence units were aware of possible attacks weeks before the bombings, but the president and prime minister both have said the intelligence was not shared with them.

Wickremesinghe blamed the incident, in part, on a "breakdown of communication." President Maithripala Sirisena, who was out of the country during the Sunday attacks, had ousted Wickremesinghe in October and dissolved the Cabinet. The Supreme Court later reversed his actions, but relations between the two top leaders have remained frigid.

In the immediate aftermath of Sunday's attacks, Sri Lanka blocked most social media, with the prime minister expressing concern that it could be used to incite violence in the country of 21 million. Wickremesinghe said Thursday that security forces were trying to help Muslim Ahmadis from Pakistan seeking refugee status in Sri Lanka, who told AP they had been attacked and beaten in the days following the bombings.

Some people "had become suspicious of foreigners, not of Muslims per se," Wickremesinghe, said.

People with happy spouses may live longer

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Research suggests that having a happy spouse leads to a longer marriage, and now study results show that it's associated with a longer life, too. The study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"The data show that spousal life satisfaction was associated with mortality, regardless of individuals' socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, or their physical health status," says study author Olga Stavrova, a researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Notably, spouses' life satisfaction was an even better predictor of participants' mortality than participants' own life satisfaction. Participants who had a happy partner at the beginning of the study were less likely to pass away over the next 8 years compared with participants who had less happy partners.

"The findings underscore the role of individuals' immediate social environment in their health outcomes. Most importantly, it has the potential to extend our understanding of what makes up individuals' 'social environment' by including the personality and well-being of individuals' close ones," says Stavrova.

Life satisfaction is known to be associated with behaviors that can affect health, including diet and exercise, and people who have a happy, active spouse, for example, are likely to have an active lifestyle themselves. The opposite is also likely to be true, says Stavrova:

"If your partner is depressed and wants to spend the evening eating chips in front of the TV -- that's how your evening will probably end up looking, as well."

Stavrova examined data from a nationally representative survey of about 4,400 couples in the United States who were over the age of 50. The survey, funded by the National Institute on Aging, collected data on participants who had spouses or live-in partners; 99% of the sampled couples were heterosexual.

For up to 8 years, participants and their spouses reported on life satisfaction and various factors hypothesized to be related to mortality, including perceived partner support and frequency of physical activity. They also completed a self-rated health measure and provided information related to their morbidity (as measured by number of doctor-diagnosed chronic conditions), gender, age at the beginning of the study, ethnicity, education, household income, and partner mortality. Participant deaths over the course of the study were tracked using the National Death Index from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or spouses' reports.

At the end of 8 years, about 16% of participants had died. Those who died tended to be older, male, less educated, less wealthy, less physically active, and in poorer health than those who were still alive; those who died also tended to report lower relationship satisfaction, lower life satisfaction, and having a partner who also reported lower life satisfaction. The spouses of participants who died were also more likely to pass away within the 8-year observation period than were spouses of participants who were still living.

The findings suggest that greater partner life satisfaction at the beginning of the study was associated with lower participant mortality risk. Specifically, the risk of mortality for participants with a happy spouse increased more slowly than mortality risk for participants with an unhappy spouse. The association between partner life satisfaction and mortality risk held even after accounting for major sociodemographic variables, self-rated health and morbidity, and partner mortality.

Exploring plausible explanations for these findings, Stavrova found that perceived partner support was not related to lower participant mortality. However, higher partner life satisfaction was related to more partner physical activity, which corresponded to higher participant physical activity, and lower participant mortality.

This research demonstrates that partner life satisfaction may have important consequences for health and longevity. Although the participants in this study were American, Stavrova believes the results are likely to apply to couples outside of the United States, as well.

"This research might have implications for questions such as what attributes we should pay attention to when selecting our spouse or partner and whether healthy lifestyle recommendations should target couples (or households) rather than individuals," says Stavrova.

Future research could also investigate larger social networks to see if the same pattern of results emerges in the context of other relationships.

###

All analysis code for this study has been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework. The data are available through the Health and Retirement Study's website. This article has received the badge for Open Materials.

For more information about this study, please contact: Olga Stavrova at O.Stavrova@uvt.nl.

The full article is available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797619835147

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Having a Happy Spouse Is Associated With Lowered Risk of Mortality" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

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Climate change has worsened global economic inequality

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Newswise — A new Stanford University study shows global warming has increased economic inequality since the 1960s. Temperature changes caused by growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere have enriched cool countries like Norway and Sweden, while dragging down economic growth in warm countries such as India and Nigeria.

"Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming," said climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, lead author of the study published April 22 in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "At the same time, the majority of rich countries are richer than they would have been."

The study, co-authored with Marshall Burke, a Stanford assistant professor of Earth system science, finds that, from 1961 to 2010, global warming decreased the wealth per person in the world's poorest countries by 17 to 30 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between the group of nations with the highest and lowest economic output per person is now approximately 25 percent larger than it would have been without climate change.

Although economic inequality between countries has decreased in recent decades, the research suggests the gap would have narrowed faster without global warming.

Ideal temperature for economic output

The study builds on previous research in which Burke and co-authors analyzed 50 years of annual temperature and GDP measurements for 165 countries to estimate the effects of temperature fluctuations on economic growth. They demonstrated that growth during warmer than average years has accelerated in cool nations and slowed in warm nations.

"The historical data clearly show that crops are more productive, people are healthier and we are more productive at work when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold," Burke explained. "This means that in cold countries, a little bit of warming can help. The opposite is true in places that are already hot."

In the current study, Diffenbaugh and Burke combined Burke's previously published estimates with data from more than 20 climate models developed by research centers around the world. Using the climate models to isolate how much each country has already warmed due to human-caused climate change, the researchers were able to determine what each country's economic output might have been had temperatures not warmed.

To account for uncertainty, the researchers calculated more than 20,000 versions of what each country's annual economic growth rate could have been without global warming. The estimates in the paper capture the range of outcomes delivered by those thousands of different routes.

"For most countries, whether global warming has helped or hurt economic growth is pretty certain," said Burke. Tropical countries, in particular, tend to have temperatures far outside the ideal for economic growth. "There's essentially no uncertainty that they've been harmed."

It's less clear how warming has influenced growth in countries in the middle latitudes, including the United States, China and Japan. For these and other temperate-climate nations, the analysis reveals economic impacts of less than 10 percent.

"A few of the largest economies are near the perfect temperature for economic output. Global warming hasn't pushed them off the top of the hill, and in many cases, it has pushed them toward it," Burke said. "But a large amount of warming in the future will push them further and further from the temperature optimum."

Dragged down by warming

While the impacts of temperature may seem small from year to year, they can yield dramatic gains or losses over time. "This is like a savings account, where small differences in the interest rate will generate large differences in the account balance over 30 or 50 years," said Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation professor in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). For example, after accumulating decades of small effects from warming, India's economy is now 31 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of global warming.

At a time when climate policy negotiations often stall over questions of how to equitably divide responsibility for curbing future warming, Diffenbaugh and Burke's analysis offers a new measure of the price many countries have already paid. "Our study makes the first accounting of exactly how much each country has been impacted economically by global warming, relative to its historical greenhouse gas contributions," said Diffenbaugh, who is also Kimmelman Family senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

While the biggest emitters enjoy on average about 10 percent higher per capita GDP today than they would have in a world without warming, the lowest emitters have been dragged down by about 25 percent. "This is on par with the decline in economic output seen in the U.S. during the Great Depression," Burke said. "It's a huge loss compared to where these countries would have been otherwise."

The researchers emphasize the importance of increasing sustainable energy access for economic development in poorer countries. "The more these countries warm up, the more drag there's going to be on their development," Diffenbaugh said. "Historically, rapid economic development has been powered by fossil fuels. Our finding that global warming has exacerbated economic inequality suggests that there is an added economic benefit of energy sources that don't contribute to further warming."

Diffenbaugh is also an affiliate of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Burke is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

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Time-Restricted Eating Shows Benefits for Blood Glucose

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Newswise — By restricting the time period during which they could eat, researchers have seen promising results for controlling blood glucose levels in men at risk of type 2 diabetes.

In a small study now published in the journal Obesity, researchers from the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) assessed the effects of time-restricted eating (TRE) in 15 men for one week.

“The men, who are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, limited their food intake to a nine-hour period per day,” says Associate Professor Leonie Heilbronn from the University’s Adelaide Medical School and SAHMRI.

“Participants undertook time-restricted eating either from 8.00am to 5.00pm or later in the day, from midday to 9.00pm. They ate their normal diet during this time,” says Associate Professor Heilbronn. “In fact, we told them to keep eating all the foods they usually eat.”

Blood glucose response to a standard meal was assessed each day of the study. The investigators found that TRE improved glucose control, regardless of when the men chose to stop eating.

“Our results suggest that modulating when, rather than what, we eat can improve glucose control.

“We did see a tiny amount of weight loss in this study, which may have contributed to the results,” Associate Professor Heilbronn says.

Fred Rochler, who has been participating in a follow-up study, has undertaken a TRE regime in which he ate his normal diet only from 9.30am to 7.30pm over a similar eight-week trial.

“The restricted eating regime was initially challenging, but soon became more manageable,” Mr Rochler says.

“I only ate up until 7.30pm as I found this worked well with my lifestyle. 

“Over the trial, I found that my fasting blood glucose tolerance improved significantly. It changed from ‘increased risk’ level to ‘normal’. This was without changing any of the foods that I like to eat,” Mr Rochler says.

Associate Professor Heilbronn says: “Time-restricted eating regimes demonstrate that we can enjoy foods that are perceived to be ‘bad’ for us, if we eat them at the right time of day, when our bodies are more biologically able to deal with the nutrient load. And perhaps more importantly, if we allow our bodies to have more time fasting each night.

“While these early results show some promise for controlling blood glucose, a larger study over a longer duration is required to fully investigate the effectiveness of this pattern of time-restricted eating,” she says.

Background

From 2000 to 2015 there were 306,201 new cases of insulin-treated type 2 diabetes in Australia: on average 19,000 new cases each year. The incidence of insulin-treated type 2 diabetes was between 1.2 to 1.5 times as high for men than women during this time. Incidence rates for insulin-treated type 2 diabetes were twice as high among those in the lowest socioeconomic group compared with those in the highest group.

Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Glucose Tolerance in Men at Risk for Type 2 Diabetes: A Randomized Crossover Trial, published in Obesity.

https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.22449

Note: the terminology used in the paper, time-restricted feeding (TRF), has now changed to time-restricted eating (TRE). 

This research is supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).