Eating carbohydrates for dinner: can it or does it make us fat?

Many people ask me for guidance on when to eat carbohydrates, turning up their noses in the face of diets in which we talk about eating pasta for dinner.

According to our food culture, the plate of pasta or rice opens the lunch, while at dinner bread or potatoes generally cover the carbohydrate share together with the vegetable side dish. But always in accompaniment to an essentially protein dish.

In this Mediterranean perspective, it didn’t make much sense to ask whether eating carbohydrates at dinner made you fat, given that the base of the Mediterranean food pyramid involves a large use of carbohydrates to be shared at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Subsequently, however, the success of various diets that limited carbohydrates at lunch and in the morning, as well as the chronodiet theory , according to which it would be good to consume certain foods only at certain times of the day in order not to gain weight, made many people believe the the fact that eating carbohydrates at dinner promoted weight gain.

Because? Because the sugars of complex carbohydrates that can be useful for carrying out various activities throughout the day would theoretically not be used in the evening, when end-of-day relaxation and night rest do not favor the disposal of that extra energy.

Indeed, there are many diets that prohibit carbohydrates after six in the afternoon.

From then on, our body would go into “night” and anabolic mode (from six in the afternoon to six in the morning), it would produce less insulin and thus be more sensitive to glucose.
It would also prepare for sleep thanks to the increased levels of melatonin, which rise within hours.
But is it true that eating carbohydrates at dinner makes you fat?