A new study has revealed exactly why working a night shift drives up your risk of obesity, stroke and heart disease.
Researchers say working a job when most are sleeping disrupts the chemical processes in our body's metabolism, which follow 24-hour rhythms, and shift our internal clocks.
Previous studies suggested that the master clock in the brain, which uses light cues to tell to our body whether it's day or night, was disrupted by working an irregular shift.
However, this study, conducted by Washington State University and the University of Surrey, is the first to show that several clocks in the body rather than just one are thrown out of sync, which causes the disruption.
It is also the first to propose what the mechanism is that drives up the risk between night shift work and chronic kidney disease.
First author Dr Debra Skene, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Surrey, told Daily Mail Online that the clocks responsible for this disruption are peripheral clocks, found in various body tissues including the liver, pancreas and digestive tract.
Past studies have shown that shift workers have an increased risk for type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease and skin cancer.
Dr Skene says the team is insure if the metabolites rhythms have changed because the patterns have changed for your shift-wake cycle, your foot intake, or the amount of time you perform activity.
Dr Skene said some suggestions depending on the findings could be not eating in evening or sleep more in evening than in daytime.
