Daytime meals might reduce health problems: Study

A small clinical trial by the National Institutes of Health states eating only during the daytime might prevent higher glucose levels for night shift workers. The study has been published in the ‘Science Advances Journal’. Authors of the study said the findings could lead to novel behavioural interventions aimed at improving the health of shift workers - grocery stockers, hotel workers, truck drives, first responders, and others, who are said to be at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
The new study, which the researchers noted is the first to demonstrate the beneficial effect of this type of meal timing intervention in humans was primarily funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Marishka Brown, Ph.D., director of the NHLBI’s National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, said, “This is a rigorous and highly controlled laboratory study that demonstrates a potential intervention for the adverse metabolic effects associated with shift work, which is a known public health concern.”
Brown added, “We look forward to additional studies that confirm the results and begin to untangle the biological underpinnings of these findings.” Researchers enrolled 19 healthy young participants for the study. After a preconditioning routine, the participants were randomly assigned to a 14-day controlled laboratory protocol involving simulated night work conditions with one of two meal schedules.
One group ate during the nighttime to mimic a meal schedule typical among night workers, and the other ate during the daytime. Researchers then evaluated the effects of these meal schedules on their internal circadian rhythms. They found that night-time eating boosted glucose levels, a risk factor for diabetes while restricting meals to the daytime prevented this effect.
Study leader Frank A.J.L. Scheer, PhD., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, said, “This is the first study in humans to demonstrate the use of meal timing as a countermeasure against the combined negative effects of impaired glucose tolerance and disrupted alignment of circadian rhythms resulting from simulated night work.”
Researchers believed that the night-tie eating effects on glucose levels during simulated night work are caused by circadian misalignment. That corresponded to the mistiming between the central circadian “clock” and behavioural sleep/wake, light/dark, and fasting/eating cycles, which can influence peripheral “clocks” throughout the body.
“This study reinforces the notion that when you eat matters for determining health outcomes such as blood sugar levels, which are relevant for night workers as they typically eat at night while on shift,” said the study co-leader Sarah L. Chellappa, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher in the nuclear medicine department at the University of Cologne, Germany.