Eating When You Should Be Sleeping Causes Weight Gain

Eating very late at night. Snacking at times that are out of sync with your circadian clock might be promoting weight gain. Researchers at Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology, who just published new evidence in the journal Obesity, were inspired by earlier studies suggesting that irregular eating habits caused certain groups of people to be overweight: shift workers awake and eating at night; people who skip breakfast; and people with night-eating syndrome, who get a large percentage of their daily caloric intake after the dinner hour and regularly wake up and go foraging in the middle of the night.

To investigate whether late-night eating might translate into more pounds than daytime eating, the Northwestern team forced a group of mice to flip their normal wake-sleep schedule and allowed them to eat a high-fat diet only when they’d normally be asleep. Compared to .. Read More