Eating Before Bed

poohpoohpeapod

because a big meal takes work for our body to digest, and can cause fluctuations in blood sugars depending on carbs ect. I would think.

LolBroScience

Late Night Eating Linked to Weight Gain

By TARA PARKER-POPE


A new study in mice suggests that it’s not just how much you eat, but when you eat it, that influences weight gain.

Researchers at Northwestern University wanted to test whether the timing of meals could influence body weight. Many diet books advise would-be weight losers to stop eating after 6 or 7 p.m. However, it’s never been clear if the strategy works as a behavioral change — we tend to overeat in the evenings in front of the television and the computer. Or is there some physiological reason late-night eating adds extra pounds?

To test whether time of feeding alone can affect body weight, the researchers studied two groups of mice who were fed identical diets of food that contained 60 percent fat. Mice are nocturnal, and they typically consume the vast majority of their calories at night and sleep during the day. For the study, half the mice were fed the diet during the daylight hours when they would normally be sleeping — simulating late-night eating in humans. The other half were given the same food on their regular eating schedule.

At the end of the six week study period, mice in both groups had consumed about the same amount of calories and performed the same amount of exercise. However, the mice who ate when they normally would have been sleeping hours posted an average 48 percent increase in body weight. The mice who ate on a regular schedule had an average increase of 20 percent of body weight. The findings will be published in the October issue of the journal Obesity.

Fred Turek, director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern and the study’s senior author, said that human studies are needed to determine if timing of food intake influences body weight, but the study suggests that late-night eating may be worse, in terms of weight gain, than eating during normal waking hours. The findings would be particularly important for shift workers, who are known to be at higher risk for obesity, diabetes and other health problems. But he notes that it’s not just shift workers who are eating late. Most people eat a large percentage of their calories in the evening and continue eating late into the night.

Dr. Turek notes that humans evolved from a situation where they ate and foraged between sunrise and sunset. “After sunset, there were no refrigerators, no food just hanging around,” he said. “You didn’t eat. But today, people eat most of their calories after sunset.”



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Strong reading comprehension, strong lack of knowledge of nutrition, strong lack of knowledge relating to laws of thermodynamics

poohpoohpeapod

Yea you know more than people studying obesity. Circadian rythym is not bs, mares are placed in lit barns to induce reproductive cycles. The sun goes up and down and our bodies react to time and light...geez. 8th grade health class

jonnythan

Yea you know more than people studying obesity. Circadian rythym is not bs, mares are placed in lit barns to induce reproductive cycles. The sun goes up and down and our bodies react to time and light...geez. 8th grade health class

8th grade health class is right. You're pretty much extrapolating a bunch of unrelated nonsense about circadian rhythms based on an 8th grade health class level of nutritional knowledge.

Meal timing is a myth. There is no evidenciary or anecdotal basis for it. This forum alone is filled with extraordinarily successful people who regularly eat shortly before bed.

LolBroScience

Are you a mouse? I eat 2,000 calories and then go to bed and have no mouse-like qualities.

jus_in_bello

I think the reason the myth began is because people do a lot of mindless eating before bed watching TV, you will lose weight if you end a habit like that, but digestion isn't something you have to be conscious to do. I eat when I'm hungry, no matter the hour.

magerum

Meal timing is irrelevant. I eat, typically, 35% of my calories within an hour of bed. Typically right up until bed time.

magerum

Our body runs on a circadian rythym which is about timing. The body is not designed to eat right before sleep. Therefor it does matter.

No.

chrisdavey

because a big meal takes work for our body to digest, and can cause fluctuations in blood sugars depending on carbs ect. I would think.

who cares? You are asleep.

mmm_drop

I like to eat IN bed, preferably if someone is feeding me, say, chocolate covered strawberries.

melindasuefritz

you body dont know what tim e it is

melindasuefritz

i stop eating at 9pm

koko12

if youre in a deficit you will not gain weight. eating RIGHT before bed might give you a stomach ache or youll be uncomfortable. but you shouldnt gain fat/weight over night. i eat before bed every night

IzzyBooNZ1

now I want ice cream

eh I eat in bed, before bed whatever . Nothing too big mind as I find this seems to keep me awake, so just a small snack but this is me and you may be different.

you will be fine!

etoiles_argentees

Actually, it's not quite clear yet.
It's an old study but I kept it due to my interest in gene expression, I'm not so interested in nutrition now, so I'll say goodnight.

Feeding the Clock
Released: 11/24/2009 8:15 PM EST
Source Newsroom: Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Newswise — When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver—the body’s metabolic clearinghouse—is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it.


“If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism,” says the study’s leader Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.

The Salk researchers’ findings, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity.

“We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle,” says Panda.

In mammals, the circadian timing system is composed of a central circadian clock in the brain and subsidiary oscillators in most peripheral tissues. The master clock in the brain is set by light and determines the overall diurnal or nocturnal preference of an animal, including sleep-wake cycles and feeding behavior. The clocks in peripheral organs are largely insensitive to changes in the light regime. Instead, their phase and amplitude are affected by many factors including feeding time.

The clocks themselves keep time through the fall and rise of gene activity on a roughly 24-hour schedule that anticipates environmental changes and adapts many of the body’s physiological function to the appropriate time of day.

“The liver oscillator in particular helps the organism to adapt to a daily pattern of food availability by temporally tuning the activity of thousands of genes regulating metabolism and physiology,” says Panda. “This regulation is very important, since the absence of a robust circadian clock predisposes the organism to various metabolic dysfunctions and diseases.”

Despite its importance, it wasn’t clear whether the circadian rhythms in hepatic transcription were solely controlled by the liver clock in anticipation of food or responded to actual food intake.

To investigate how much influence rhythmic food intake exerts over the hepatic circadian oscillator, graduate student and first author Christopher Vollmers put normal and clock-deficient mice on strictly controlled feeding and fasting schedules while monitoring gene expression across the whole genome.

He found that putting mice on a strict 8-hour feeding/16-hour fasting schedule restored the circadian transcription pattern of most metabolic genes in the liver of mice without a circadian clock. Conversely, during prolonged fasting, only a small subset of genes continued to be transcribed in a circadian pattern even with a functional circadian clock present.

“Food-induced transcription functions like a metabolic sand timer that runs for 24 hours and is continually reset by the feeding schedule while the central circadian clock is driven by self-sustaining rhythms that help us anticipate food, based on our usual eating schedule,” says Vollmers. “But in the real world we don’t eat at the same time every day and it makes perfect sense to increase the activity of metabolic genes when you need them the most.”

For example, genes that encode enzymes needed to break down sugars rise immediately after a meal, while the activity of genes encoding enzymes needed to break down fat is highest when we fast. Consequently a clearly defined daily feeding schedule puts the enzymes of metabolism in shift work and optimizes burning of sugar and fat.

“Our study represents a seminal shift in how we think about circadian cycles,” says Panda. “The circadian clock is no longer the sole driver of rhythms in gene function, instead the phase and amplitude of rhythmic gene function in the liver is determined by feeding and fasting periods—the more defined they are, the more robust the oscillations become.”

While the importance of robust metabolic rhythms for our health has been demonstrated by shift workers’ increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome, the underlying molecular reasons are still unclear. Panda speculates that the oscillations serve one big purpose: to separate incompatible processes, such as the generation of DNA-damaging reactive oxygen species and DNA replication.

Panda, for one, has stopped eating between 8 pm and 8 am and says he feels great. “I even lost weight, although I eat whatever I want during the day,” he says.

Researchers who also contributed the work include postdoctoral researcher Luciano DiTacchio, Ph.D., graduate students Sandhyarani Pulivarthy and Shubhrox Gill, as well as research assistant Hiep Le, all in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.
The work was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the Pew Scholars Program in Biomedical Sciences.


About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is one of the world's preeminent basic research institutions, where internationally renowned faculty probe fundamental life science questions in a unique, collaborative, and creative environment. Focused both on discovery and on mentoring future generations of researchers, Salk scientists make groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of cancer, aging, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders by studying neuroscience, genetics, cell and plant biology, and related disciplines.

Faculty achievements have been recognized with numerous honors, including Nobel Prizes and memberships in the National Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1960 by polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, M.D., the Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark.

j6o4

If it fits your macros

MG_Fit

That's for everyone's help last night! I ended up having my guilty pleasure before bed :bigsmile:

akaythelion

Well guys, think. How did man eat back in the hunter/scavener age? They didn't have much food during the day and ate their kills at night, and went to sleep! And they weren't fat.

__Di__

I have a space to eat a little more today which is really good. I was thinking about having some Breyer's coffee ice cream (my favorite).

The problem is I read somewhere that you shouldn't eat before you go to sleep because your metabolism shuts down while you sleep because your body isn't really doing anything. Therefore eating before bed is like twice as bad for you because your body is in its sleep state.

Does anyone know anything about this. I really want some ice cream, but I'm going to sleep in the next 30 minutes.

If you want it and you have enough calories left, then have it.

The metabolism does NOT shut down when asleep, if it did you would die.

jamielynas

if you eat after 8:59PM it's all stored as fat obviously