Middle of the night snacking may harm heart health

It’s 3 a.m. Are you in bed sound asleep or standing in front of your refrigerator searching for snacks to eat?  If you answered searching for snacks, beware.  A nightly ritual of waking up past midnight to raid the fridge is no friend to your heart and may also put you at risk of developing diabetes.

A routine of waking up in the middle of the night to eat disrupts the working of the body’s biological clock.  Our body has something called the circadian rhythm, our body’s internal clock.  Our internal clock wants us to be fast asleep in bed during the wee hours of the morning and not standing in front of the refrigerator.

Normally when we eat during the daylight hours and are up moving about, our body metabolizes food much more quickly. This also leads to your lipids or fats in your blood such as cholesterol to be absorbed by the liver, muscles and other tissues. 

But when getting out of bed to raid the fridge during the night, you likely are choosing high fat, sweet, or salty foods such as ice cream or cupcakes instead of apples or oranges. Then once you’ve had your fill and head back to bed, the fats from these foods will hang around longer in your blood than normal which may lead to heightened triglyceride levels, impacting your risk of cardiovascular disease and including diabetes. 

The best bet is to eat only during daylight hours and not to cave in to the midnight munchies.  But, if waking up in the middle of the night has become a habit, there are ways to break this cycle:

·      Figure out the reason why

If you find yourself eating the majority of your calories late in the evening or even during the night, you need to identify the cause.  Nighttime eating could be the result of overly restricted daytime food intake leading to ravenous hunger at night.  But it could also be due to boredom, habit, or binge eating disorder.  Identifying the cause will help you take the steps to solve the problem

·      Identify triggers

Begin to monitor your behavior patterns and identify what triggers you to eat at night. This can help break the cycle of emotional eating. 

·      Get into a routine of structured eating

By having structured meals during the days along with structured sleep times, this can help you spread your food intake over the day so you are less hungry at night. A routine for meal and sleep times can help break the unhealthy cycle of this behavior. 

Part of this routine is to plan your meals.  By planning your meals and snacks this can reduce the chances you will eat on impulse making poor food choices

·      Keep junk food out of the house

Remove any unhealthy food out of the house.  Doing so will stop you from snacking on it throughout the night.  Stock up instead on snack-friendly foods such as fruits, berries, plain yogurt and cottage cheese.