Eating only during daytime may prevent heart problems due to night shift: Study
While shift work is a known risk factor for cardiovascular events, a new study on Tuesday showed that eating only during the daytime may prevent the risks
- NEW DELHI — While
shift work is a known risk factor for cardiovascular events, a new study on
Tuesday showed that eating only during the daytime may prevent the risks.
-
- Sleep timing has been a major area of focus, but researchers
from Mass General Brigham, US, and the University of Southampton, UK, stated
that food timing could be a bigger risk factor when it comes to cardiovascular
health.
-
- Previous studies have shown that working the night shift is
associated with serious health risks, including to the heart, due to circadian
misalignment -- the mistiming of our behavioural cycle relative to our internal
body clock.
-
- The researchers found that cardiovascular risk factors
including autonomic nervous system markers, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1
(which increases the risk of blood clots), and blood pressure increased after
night work.
-
- However, the risk factors stayed the same in the
participants who only ate during the daytime.
-
- “Avoiding or limiting eating during nighttime hours may
benefit night workers, those who experience insomnia or sleep-wake disorders,
individuals with variable sleep/wake cycles, and people who travel frequently
across time zones,” said the team, in the paper, published in the journal
Nature Communications.
-
- The study included 20 healthy young participants. For two
weeks they had no access to windows, watches, or electronics that would clue
their body clocks into the time.
-
- The participants followed a "constant routine
protocol," a controlled laboratory setup that can tease apart the effects
of circadian rhythms from those of the environment and behaviours (for example,
sleep/wake, light/dark patterns).
-
- During this protocol, the participants stayed awake for 32
hours in a dimly lit environment, maintaining constant body posture and eating
identical snacks every hour.
-
- After that, they participated in simulated night work and
were assigned to either eat during the nighttime (as most night workers do) or
only during the daytime.
-
- Importantly, both groups had an identical schedule of naps,
and, thus, any differences between the groups were not due to differences in
sleep schedule.
-
- "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 author Sarah Chellappa, an associate professor at the University of
Southampton.
