Avoiding late night meals is one of the main tenets of any diet plan, since your metabolism naturally wind downs toward the end of the day. However, whether you've just come home from a night shift or are in the middle of a nocturnal study session, when your stomach starts growling, common sense can easily be overlooked if there are enticing leftovers in the fridge.
But, according to a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, dining at night means going against your body's inherent eating rhythms and can have a significant impact on how your body uses calories. Nutrition and the brain are directly linked, as the food you eat affects the amount of energy stored in your body's fat cells, which is immediately transmitted to the mind. Every fat cell has a clock gene to moderate your appetite and promote optimum energy collection.
ScienceDaily reports that once that element was removed from lab mice, they began to feed at unnatural hours. This led to increased weight gain compared to animals that maintained regular eating schedules, even with identical calorie intake. In addition, the altered patterns of food consumption impaired the release of essential fatty acids into the bloodstream, leading to lower levels of EPA and DHA in the blood and brain.
When the researchers discovered this impact, they experimented with omega-3 fatty acid supplements to determine if the chemical effects of irregular eating patterns could somehow be reduced.
"To our amazement, we were able to rescue the entire phenotype – inappropriate fatty acid oscillation and gene expression in the hypothalamus, feeding pattern and obesity – by supplementing EPA and DHA to the knock-out animals," said research associate.
So, while it's best to limit your caloric intake to the daylight hours, taking a supplement like Nordic Naturals DHA may help counteract the effects of nighttime snacking.
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