Worried your night shift routine is taking a toll on your heart? Recent research suggests it’s not too late to turn things around. Researchers now reveal that a simple change in your meal timing could bring protective effects on heart health, even if your work schedule stays the same.
In the latest study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers noted that individuals working on a night shift face fewer heart health risk factors if they only ate during the daytime.
“Our study controlled for every factor that you could imagine that could affect the results, so we can say that it’s the food timing effect that is driving these changes in the cardiovascular risk factors,” said lead researcher Dr. Sarah Chellappa in a news release.
A previous study by the same research team revealed that circadian misalignment, when daily activities like eating and sleeping fall out of sync with the body’s internal clock, can significantly raise the risk of cardiovascular problems.
“We wanted to understand what can be done to lower this risk, and our new research suggests food timing could be that target,” said senior researcher Frank Scheer.
Studies have shown that aligning food timing with the internal body clock might help reduce heart risk in those staying awake through the night, but those were based on animal trials. To understand how it affects humans, researchers evaluated 20 healthy young people in a two-week sleep lab study at the Brigham and Women’s Center for Clinical Investigation.
Participants were kept in a controlled environment, with no access to natural light, clocks, or electronics, effectively disconnecting them from time cues. After staying awake for 32 hours to disrupt their body clocks, they began a simulated night shift routine.
During this experiment, some participants were randomly assigned to eat only during the daytime, while the rest were allowed to eat during the night as most shift workers do. All the workers had an identical schedule for sleep to eliminate any differences due to sleep schedule.
The researchers noted that those participants who ate throughout the night experienced a rise in heart-related risk factors after the night shifts. Meanwhile, participants who limited their eating to daytime hours saw no such increase, even though they consumed the same foods.
“These findings indicate that daytime eating, despite mistimed sleep, may mitigate changes in cardiovascular risk factors and offer translational evidence for developing a behavioral strategy to help minimize the adverse changes in cardiovascular risk factors in individuals exposed to circadian misalignment, such as shift workers,” researchers concluded.
Although large-scale studies are needed to confirm the long-term health effects of daytime versus nighttime eating, researchers note that the findings of the study are “promising.”
