Here's how eating late could be damaging to your body
| Updated: Mar 5, 2018, 15:15 IST
With our lifestyles, it is sometimes inevitable that we eat late and hence resulting in eating our dinners really late into the night too. Well, researchers are now claiming this practice to be detrimental to health. After decades of scientific back and forth, new findings from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that restricting your eating to earlier in the day could be one of the most important health tips you can follow. An ongoing study found that compared to shutting down the kitchen in the early evening, raiding the fridge after hours negatively impacts your weight, fat metabolism and markers for heart disease and diabetes.
Analysing changes in the participants’ (volunteers who were taken in for the study) weight, metabolism and calorie intake, researchers found that when the group ate later in the day, their weight, insulin, fasting glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels worsened. Also troubling was the volunteers’ hormonal shifts: The later eating shift led to delayed spikes in the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin, slowing the release of leptin, the hormone that signals fullness; the opposite was true for the daytime eating plan.
The implication is that eating earlier in the day actually helps prevent eating late at night, a habit that appears to be really bad for you! “We know from our sleep-loss studies that when you’re sleep deprived, it negatively affects weight and metabolism in part due to late-night eating, but now these early findings, which control for sleep, give a more comprehensive picture of the benefits of eating earlier in the day,” said the study’s lead author Namni Goel, PhD. “Eating later can promote a negative profile of weight, energy, and hormone markers—such as higher glucose and insulin, which are implicated in diabetes, and cholesterol and triglycerides, which are linked with cardiovascular problems and other health conditions," the author added.
Analysing changes in the participants’ (volunteers who were taken in for the study) weight, metabolism and calorie intake, researchers found that when the group ate later in the day, their weight, insulin, fasting glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels worsened. Also troubling was the volunteers’ hormonal shifts: The later eating shift led to delayed spikes in the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin, slowing the release of leptin, the hormone that signals fullness; the opposite was true for the daytime eating plan.
The implication is that eating earlier in the day actually helps prevent eating late at night, a habit that appears to be really bad for you! “We know from our sleep-loss studies that when you’re sleep deprived, it negatively affects weight and metabolism in part due to late-night eating, but now these early findings, which control for sleep, give a more comprehensive picture of the benefits of eating earlier in the day,” said the study’s lead author Namni Goel, PhD. “Eating later can promote a negative profile of weight, energy, and hormone markers—such as higher glucose and insulin, which are implicated in diabetes, and cholesterol and triglycerides, which are linked with cardiovascular problems and other health conditions," the author added.