A seven year trial involving 2,400 women tested the impact of late night eating and showed that timing could be highly significant. Those who typically ate after 8pm were significantly fatter than those who ate earlier.
Further proof that late night eating alters your ability to handle food comes from a study by John Hopkin’s University School of Medicine in the US which found that when healthy volunteers had their dinner within an hour of going to bed, they burnt 10 percent less fat overnight than when they stopped eating three hours earlier.
It seems that our bodies don’t like having to deal with lots of food late at night. Not only is this because late night eating alters your body clock, but it also seems to alter your microbiome, the 100 trillion microbes that live in your gut.
Eating late encourages the growth of ‘bad’ microbes that raise inflammation and damage healthy tissue. Perhaps we should follow the example of Norwegians who are regularly rated as among the healthiest and happiest people in the world. Even 7.30 pm. would be considered late in Norway where they typically eat their evening meal by 5pm.
