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The timing of your eating habits also has an impact on the heart.

A team of Indian-American researchers have found that not only the eating habits, but also the time of eating equally matters in order to protect the heart from early aging.

"Time-restricted feeding would not require people to drastically change their lifestyles but just the times of day they eat," said Girish Melkani, biologist at the San Diego State University.

The experiment which was conducted on fruit flies showed that one day the cardiac and obesity related problems of human can be reduced.

In the experiment, both young and old flies were introduced to a time-restricted diet and the result showed that the heart of not only older, but also younger flies were healthier.

"Even if you introduce time-restricted feeding very late, you still have some benefit," Melkani pointed out. Melkani, along with Satchidananda Panda, circadian rhythms expert at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Shubhroz Gill from the Broad Institute in Boston found that by limiting the time span during which fruit flies could eat, they could prevent aging- and diet-related heart problems.

Previous research had shown that people who tend to eat later in the day and into the night have a higher chance of developing heart disease than people who cut off their food consumption earlier."So what is happening when people eat late? They are not changing their diet just the time," Melkani added.In their experiments, one group of two-week-old fruit flies was given a standard diet of cornmeal and allowed to feed all day long.

Another group was allowed access to the food for only 12 hours a day. After three weeks, the results were clear.Flies on the 12-hour time-restricted feeding schedule slept better, did not gain as much weight and had far healthier hearts than their "eat anytime" counterparts, even though they ate similar amounts of food.

-Smrutirekha