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What is too late to eat overnight?

How Late Is Too Late to Eat? There's no be-all and end-all on what time you should close the kitchen. Some researchers define "eating late" as eating your last meal less than two hours before bedtime, while other research suggests cutting yourself off by 6 p.m. delivers the greatest health benefits.

cosmopolitan.com - How Late-Night Eating REALLY Affects Your Body - Cosmopolitan

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Sometimes hunger strikes at the least opportune moments — like right after you brush your teeth and tuck yourself into bed. Other times, you just don't get around to eating dinner until it's way late. Whoops.

But how bad is it, really, to kick off the covers for a late-night snack or sit down to dinner when you probably should be shutting off the lights?

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Late-night eaters won't like the answer, which was recently derived by a panel of experts who dove deeper into existing research than your hand's ever gone into a bag of Cheetos. Here's where they net out on the adverse effects of late-night eating — and how to sidestep them — as summarized in a review published in Circulation, the American Heart Association's academic journal.

Why Meal Times Matters

For a long time, experts thought that what you eat matters way more than when you eat it. But things are changing as new research emerges. See, your body's internal clock (i.e., circadian rhythm) has an innate sense of when it's supposed to charge ahead at full speed to fuel your daily activities, and when to take a load off for the rest and repair it needs to keeps you functioning in tip-top shape. While your brain is mostly in charge here, and your environment's light/dark cycles tend to direct the show, eating when your body's clock says you should be sleeping can reset the clocks of individual organs. Because bodily systems work best when they're working in tandem, experts think eating late at night can royally fuck you up, with short- and long-term consequences ranging from weight gain to metabolic syndrome, the group of risk factors that set you up for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

How Late Is Too Late to Eat?

There's no be-all and end-all on what time you should close the kitchen. Some researchers define "eating late" as eating your last meal less than two hours before bedtime, while other research suggests cutting yourself off by 6 p.m. delivers the greatest health benefits. One of the many studies cited in this review involves women who ate dinner at either 6 p.m. or 11 p.m. The next morning, the late eaters had worse blood sugar control, a risk factor for type-2 diabetes — so there's that. Still, other studies suggest simply restricting your eating hours and maxing out on your overnight "fast" by taking your last bites of the day as early as possible, then pushing breakfast back the next day, so your fast that lasts at least 12 hours "could be a promising method for weight management." (FWIW, I tried restricting my eating to eight hours a day, and I did lose weight.) That said, all signs suggest the body is best primed to digest food earlier in the day, since existing studies suggest that breakfast eaters have a lower risk of heart disease and weight gain than breakfast skippers.

The Takeaway

Your body will function best if you eat more earlier in the day. That said, don't beat yourself up if your lifestyle doesn't bode well for eating dinner with the early birds — maximizing the length of your overnight "fast" appears to have protective benefits too, even though more research on humans is needed.

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Why is chocolate not good before bed?

Theobromine, which increases heart rate and causes sleeplessness, is found in small amounts in chocolate, especially dark. The National Sleep Foundation recommends avoiding chocolate — as well as coffee, tea and soft drinks — before bedtime.

nytimes.com - The Claim: Chocolate Can Be Disruptive to Sleep

THE FACTS

Chocolate can stir affection and awaken the taste buds, but some people wonder if it can have a less pleasant side effect: keeping them up at night. Chocolate contains caffeine, as many people know, but in varying amounts depending on the type. A 1.5-ounce Hershey’s milk chocolate bar, for example, contains nine milligrams, about three times as much caffeine as a cup of decaffeinated coffee. But a dark chocolate Hershey’s candy bar has far more: about 30 milligrams. That is the same as a cup of instant tea, and slightly less than a typical cup of brewed tea, about 40 milligrams. In other words, a dark chocolate dessert, eaten late enough, might leave you counting plenty of sheep.

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