Our body is made up of the food we intake. So, if you wish to have a healthy body, having nutritious food items in your diet is a must. But is that everything we need to do? Probably not. Having timely meals is as important as the food we take. Botched up meal cycle can affect the nutrition of your body even while having a balanced diet and can further lead to health complications. A recent study by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital has revealed that nighttime eating habits can lead to glucose intolerance in the human bodies whereas daytime meals help to regulate bloodstream glucose levels, reported Science Daily.
The finding of the report published in the Science Advances Journal showed that Night-time eating caused misalignment between the body’s central and peripheral circadian clocks that act as natural timekeepers regulating mental physical and behavioural changes over a 24-hour cycle.
Frank A.J.L. Scheer is the study’s co-corresponding author and the director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at the Brigham. He said that the results showed that meal timing was responsible for the effects on glucose tolerance and beta-cell function probably due to the misalignment of central and peripheral ‘clocks’ throughout the body.
For the study, researchers performed a randomized controlled trial involving 19 healthy young participants who underwent a 14-day controlled laboratory protocol. For the experiments, the candidates had to stay awake for 32 hours in an extensively controlled dimly lit environment while constant body postures and consuming identical snacks every hour. The candidates had no time cue — conditions that are part of a constant routine protocol.
After this, participants underwent simulated night work where they were divided into two groups following different eating schedules. The first group ate at night to simulate the schedule of night shift employees whereas the other group ate during the day to align their meal schedule with the 24-hour cycle of the central circadian “clock.”
Finally, the participant had to follow a 40-hour constant routine protocol to assess the after-effects of the meal schedules on their endogenous circadian rhythms
The finding showed that the participants who ate at night had higher blood glucose levels, whereas those who ate exclusively during the day had no significant increases. Furthermore, nighttime eating reduced pancreatic beta-cell activity compared to no change in those who only ate during the day.
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