Is eating late, like nightly pizza, unhealthy?
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A dinner that isn’t cooked until ten o’clock or the slice of pizza that night after the party: Is eating too late bad for your health? And when is late to late?
Sometimes it is due to time constraints or you are hungry again late in the evening because of a late lunch. And sometimes you get hungry in the middle of the night. Meals that are eaten after 8 p.m. are considered late in this country. One hears again and again that eating should have consequences for health after a certain time. What’s up
Where did the myth come from?
For many proponents of the thesis, the fact that eating late is unhealthy has to do with the secretion of insulin: if the blood sugar levels rise at late dinner, insulin is also released and this is supposed to promote fat build-up during sleep. So far, however, no study has been able to prove this and it also seems somewhat illogical: Countries in which dinners tend to be late should then also have an unhealthy or increasingly obese population. Often, however, the opposite is the case.
High risk of overeating in the evening
What has been proven, however, and what could probably be described as “unhealthy”, is the fact that people tend to overeat in the evening: In a study published in the “International Journal of Obesity”, researchers found that the concentration of the so-called hunger hormone ghrelin increases in the evening and is disproportionately high in additional stressful situations. At the same time, the levels of a hormone that is related to the feeling of satiety continue to fall over the course of the day.
Our result suggests that the risk of overeating in the evening is particularly high.
Susan Carnell, a graduate assistant in psychiatry and behavioral research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study, concluded that the risk of overeating in the evening is particularly high. The unhealthy thing about eating late is probably not the food as such, but the excessive amount.
If your stomach is still digesting food late at night, you may not sleep very well. If you don’t want to be influenced by digestion while sleeping, it is best to eat two hours before going to bed.
How much should you eat in the evening?
The appropriate type and amount of dinner depends on how much you have already eaten during the day and how much you have moved. If you have already consumed a lot of calories at breakfast, lunch and snacks, you can have a light meal in the evening and also make sure to choose an appropriate portion.
Doctor Jamie A. Koufman commented on the study cited above in a comment for The New York Times. In his article, he describes how late eating – especially when meals are considered heavy and unhealthy and there is no subsequent exercise – disrupts the processes in our body that are responsible for processing food. A functioning digestion is extremely important in order to absorb important nutrients from food and to excrete what we don’t need. So if you want to take care of your health, you would rather do without the midnight pizza from the delivery service. Unless, of course, you go extensively afterwards.
Do you watch the time while eating? Or do you just eat when you are hungry?
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