Effect of time-restricted eating patterns on circadian cortisol secretion and metabolic parameters in prediabetic individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Meal timing may matter as much as meal composition for metabolic health a claim increasingly backed by chronobiology research but rarely tested through the lens of cortisol rhythmicity in people at the threshold of diabetes. This controlled trial evaluated whether a 16:8 time-restricted eating (TRE) pattern alters circadian cortisol output and improves metabolic markers in adults with prediabetes. Ninety-two participants (fasting glucose 100-125 mg/dL or HbA1c 5.7-6.4%) were randomised to either a TRE arm (eating window 10:00-18:00, n = 48) or a usual-eating control arm (no timing restriction, n = 44) for 12 weeks at the Ottawa Metabolic Research Institute. Salivary cortisol was sampled at five timepoints across the day (awakening, +30 min, noon, 16:00, 22:00) at baseline and week 12. The primary outcome was change in the cortisol awakening response (CAR) area under the curve. Secondary outcomes included fasting glucose, HbA1c, HOMA-IR, fasting triglycerides, and body weight. At 12 weeks the TRE group showed a 22.3% reduction in CAR-AUC (p = 0.001) compared with 6.1% in controls (p = 0.187). Morning peak cortisol fell by 3.8 ± 1.9 μg/dL in the TRE arm versus 0.7 ± 1.5 μg/dL in controls (between-group p<0.001). Fasting glucose decreased by 11.4 mg/dL in TRE versus 3.1 mg/dL in controls (p<0.001), and HOMA-IR dropped by 0.9 ± 0.6 units versus 0.2 ± 0.5 units (p = 0.002). Change in morning cortisol and change in HOMA-IR were moderately correlated in the TRE group (r = 0.52, p = 0.003) but not in controls (r = 0.21, p = 0.174). Body weight fell by 2.7 kg in TRE and 0.8 kg in controls. These findings suggest that confining food intake to an 8-hour daytime window resets cortisol rhythmicity and concurrently improves insulin sensitivity and glycaemic control in prediabetic adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".