Recent Research Suggests That People Who Eat And Sleep Late May Lead To Weight Gain
A recent study by Northwestern Medicine. What they found was that people who go to bed later tend to eat on average 248 calories per day, compared to people who don't sleep so late. This extra eating tend to occur during dinner and then later on in the evening. The over eaters tended to eat more fast food and more sodas and less fruit. Although this extra calorie intake may not seem like much, it can add to a cumulative effect of 2 extra pounds per month, assuming that no other changes in behaviour are done at the same time.
Details of the study
The study comprised 51 subjects, with 28 standard sleepers and 23 late sleepers, with an average age of 30. They were followed for one week. A wrist actigraph was used to calculate sleep and activity levels, and they also complete diaries where they outlined their food consumption.
The late sleepers went to sleep at an average time of 3:45 am and tended to wake up by 10:45 am, they then ate breakfast at 12, lunch at 2:30 pm, dinner at 8:15 pm and a final meal at 10:00 pm, these are all average times. The standard sleepers on average were up by 8:00 am, ate breakfast by 9:00 am, lunch at 1:00pm, dinner at 7:00 pm, a last snack at 8:30pm and were asleep by 12:30 am.
The study also indicated that as well as more calories being consumed, the timing of the consumption also had a perceived effect, with the people eating after 8pm tending to have a higher BMI.
Summary
This study suggests that someone looking to reduce their calorie intake could do so by potentially getting to an earlier bed time routine, and also avoiding eating after 8pm. It should be noted though that the study could be that the normal sleepers tend to be more disciplined eaters and so even if a late sleeper shifted to a normal sleep pattern they may still over consume. For a follow up study it would be interesting to see get a group of late sleepers and ask them to modify their sleeping patterns to be more normal sleepers, then identify whether calorie reduction also took place, if it did indeed occur then this would lend weight to the significant calorie reduction that can occur by this relatively simple lifestyle change.