My Mom and Dad both brought me up to believe that the simplest, most common-sensical solution to a problem is best. The KISS Principle. So it has proven with cardio health and maintenance. A new study insists when you eat is key to optimal heart health…
Late evening meals or midnight snacking may increase your cardiac health risks…
Researchers from Mass General Brigham say they’ve confirmed that when you eat is just as important as what you eat, when it comes to optimizing your cardio health…
What they did
The team conducted a carefully controlled lab study, splitting 20 healthy volunteers into two groups. A ‘control’ group ate their meals both during the day and at night to replicate real-world shift workers and their usual eating schedules. An intervention group only ate during the day.
he participants took part in the study for two weeks, during which they had no access to windows, electronics, or watches, ensuring their bodies had no clues about the time of day. This means the only difference between the two groups was their eating times.
“Our study controlled for every factor that you could imagine that could affect the results, so we can say that it’s the food timing effect that is driving these changes in the cardiovascular risk factors,” Dr Sarah Chellappa, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, and lead author for the paper, shared in a statement.
The researchers measured several heart health and blood clotting risk factors, including heart rate variability (HRV) to evaluate how well the heart adapts to changes, the levels of plasminogen acti-vator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), a protein that regulates blood clotting, as well as both heart rate and cortisol levels to assess stress.
What they found
The group who who eat around the clock showed lower HRV and higher PAI-1 readings then the group who ate only during daytime hours. In addition, the daytime eaters exhibited a 6 percent to 8 percent reduction in blood pressure.
The takeaway
For those who work night shifts or often face sleep disruptions, restricting meals to daytime might help mitigate some of the heart risks associated with these irregular schedules.
It was also suggested that frequent flyers who experience jet lag and associated sleep cycle disrup-tions may also benefit from eating only during daytime hours.
Most intriguing to me was, the longstanding advice of our wiser elders and physicians, not to eat in the evenings – especially just before bedtime – has been correct all along. There’s the KISS principle kicking in again!
~ Maggie J.