Sorry for the impromptu hiatus. It has been a rough couple
of weeks.
So...I
feel like this is a relatively well-known fact: You shouldn't eat at night.
Seems simple enough, but a recent study has discovered the reasons for it.
During the nighttime hours, the body actually turns more of the food into fats
as opposed to fuels - like it does during the day.
The
study was published in the Current Biology journal, and in the study it was
found that mice (which are nocturnal) had a variant ability to regulate blood
sugar and when the researchers disrupted their sleep cycle (a circadian rhythm)
they were also more likely to put on greater amounts of fat.
This
study makes me think of all of the Tom and Jerry episodes I have watched
throughout the years. All I can say, is thank goodness Jerry gets all the
exercise running from Tom - or he would have been super overweight (and
probably eaten). I think that would have kind of ruined the show for me.
Another
interesting part of this story is that the researchers believe there is some
connection between working
night-shifts and the likelihood of being overweight and getting diabetes. This has
been show in previous studies, but is now believed that there could be a link
between the two. To test this, researchers looked to see how well the mice's
bodies processed foods throughout the entire circadian cycle. It was found that
during the day, the mice were not particularly receptive to insulin. Due to
this lack of response, their bodies did not take sugar from the blood to use as
energy, but it rather got
stored as fat. They next tried keeping the mice under dim light all the
time, and the mice actually became somewhat insulin resistant - and they put on
more fat.
I
guess, the moral of the story is don't just watch what you eat, but also when
you eat. And maybe try to get a job where you don't have to work the
nightshift.
Full article - here
Info on the Circadian cycle - here
