Researchers have claimed that if a person wants to keep his body slim then his lunch should be the biggest meal of the day while dinner should be the lightest.

The study showed the body’s ability to make use of the sugar in food fluctuates throughout the day, in tune with the body’s own clock. And if it is disturbed then it is easy to put on weight.

US researchers studied mice but they believe that people can benefit from timing their meals to be in tune their body clock.

Professor Carl Johnson, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, carefully measured levels of insulin “a hormone which plays a key role in the conversion of the sugar in our food into energy” and found that rather than amounts of insulin staying relatively constant over time, there was a clear pattern, with the animals finding it harder to deal with sugar when they would usually sleep.

He said in the animals whose body clocks were sent haywire, the pattern vanished, and sugar posed a problem day and night, the Daily Mail reported.