A short medical experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health discovered that dining late at night, as several shift employees do, can raise glucose concentrations, but eating just during daytime can avoid the increased glucose levels now associated with nighttime employment.
The results might lead to innovative behavioral therapies designed to improve the heath of night shifts, such as grocery stockers, hotel employees, truckers, first responders, and many others, who have been linked to an elevated risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity in previous research.
The recent research, that the scientists claim is the first to show that this form of mealtime intervention is advantageous in humans, is published in the journal Science Advances.
“This is a rigorous and highly controlled laboratory study that demonstrates a potential intervention for the adverse metabolic effects associated with shift work, which is a known public health concern. We look forward to additional studies that confirm the results and begin to untangle the biological underpinnings of these findings.” declared the director of the NHLBI’s National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, Marishka Brown
The study recruited 19 healthy younger people, out of which 7 were women. The individuals were arbitrarily allocated to a 2-week controlled lab regimen incorporating simulating night shifts circumstances with 1 of 2 meal plans after a reprogramming process. One team ate at night to simulate the meal routine of night employees, whereas the other team ate throughout the daytime.
After that, the study examined at how various meal regimens affected their internal circadian cycles. That’s the internal mechanism that controls the sleeping-awake loop, as well as the 24-hour cycle of nearly all of your biological activities, notably metabolism. This research backs up the idea that time you eat has an impact on health outcomes like blood sugar levels, which is important for night workers because they often eat late at night.
