Many activities in life, such as work, study or watching football late at night, there should be people who often eat late at night. However, that habit negatively affects our health. This article will help you understand more about the harmful effects of eating late at night.

 

How does eating late at night affect your health?

The habit of eating at night, explicitly eating later than 20 hours, will harm human health. 

First of all, it will overload the body's digestive system. Because physiologically, the night is when the body needs to rest.

If we eat at night, the digestive system will secrete gastric juice. Internal organs such as the intestines, liver, pancreas, stomach, and even the oral cavity must secrete digestive enzymes to continue working.

Most people rarely tolerate hunger at night because at this time, the stomach will rumble, and it will be difficult to sleep. Therefore, you often have to find something to fill your hungry stomach at this time. If you often have a habit of eating late at night, it will cause harmful health problems.

 

1. Risk of heart disease

There are quite a few studies that prove that eating late increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

For example, scientists from Dokuz Eylul University (Turkey) surveyed more than 700 adults with high blood pressure to determine the relationship between late-night eating and the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, blood pressure.

Accordingly, eating dinner will have the most significant impact on blood pressure overnight. If you eat dinner about 2 hours before going to bed, it will be more harmful to your health than those who eat 3 to 3.5 hours before bed. 

A study of 700 people found that 24.2% of those who ate dinner 2 hours before going to bed had high blood pressure that didn't drop overnight.

 

2. Weight gain, obesity

Eating at night can cause overweight and obesity. This effect occurs because the body's metabolism tends to slow down at the end of the day, so the food will be difficult to digest if you eat too late. Instead of being converted into energy, these foods turn into fat and make the body fat quickly, especially the lower abdomen. If this condition persists, the risk of obesity will be very high.

 

3. Diabetes

Eating at night will reduce insulin production. Insulin works to control blood sugar. Therefore, when the amount of insulin is not enough, it will cause blood sugar to rise, leading to diabetes. When you have diabetes, you are at high risk of experiencing dangerous complications such as blurred vision or even blindness, leg ulcers. Therefore, they can easily lead to gangrene and amputation, kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, etc.

 

4. Nervous effects

A study at the University of California, USA, shows that eating at night affects cognition.

Specifically, the scientists raised two groups of mice and fed them at different times. One group ate during the day and the other at night as usual. The results showed that the mice fed during the day had less cognitive disruption than the group of mice that continued to eat as usual at night.

Not only that, people who have a habit of eating at night will also constantly have strange and haunting dreams.

In 2015, Canadian psychologists investigated how eating habits can negatively affect dreams. The survey was conducted by 400 college students who answered a questionnaire about their diet, sleep and dreams.

Eating too full at night puts pressure on the surrounding organs, making them work less efficiently. Therefore, it will also cause poor communication to the brain, seriously affecting the nervous system, causing a nervous breakdown.

 

5. You are more hungry the next day

This condition occurs due to the pancreas' insulin secretes after a meal. As a result, more glucose is produced, which leads to the activation of a hormone called "Ghrelin", which is responsible for creating hunger.

Ghrelin often uses naturally occurring bouts of fasting from around 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. to self-regulate, to ensure you only feel your normal hunger levels in the morning. However, if you eat late at night, the cycle will continue, and you will feel hungrier than usual. From there, the risk of gaining weight is difficult to avoid.

Therefore, according to researchers' advice, it is best not to eat at night. If you are hungry, you should only eat at least 3 hours before bedtime. That is, if you usually sleep at 11 o'clock, you should only eat before 8 o'clock so that the food has enough time to digest not to harm your health. Thus, it will avoid the harmful effects of eating late at night very effectively. 

 

6. Effects your sleep

Eating at night causes the stomach to work harder to digest food. So the stomach keeps performing like that during sleep, making it impossible for the body to rest completely, but falling into a state of difficulty sleeping restless sleep. In particular, if you often eat at night, it will disturb the biological clock, which will make you lose sleep in the middle.

Poor quality sleep can lead to more severe problems like memory loss, depression, blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer.

 

7. Hypertension, atherosclerosis, stroke

The habit of eating at night increases the "burden" of the stomach and increases blood pressure. In particular, if you eat and then sleep right away, it will slow down blood circulation. As a result, fat components in the blood will seep into the vessel walls, causing cardiovascular disease.

More dangerously, heartburn and acid reflux symptoms caused by eating at night can lead to sleep apnea, increasing stroke risk.

 

8. Stomach disease

After eating at night, you will quickly experience stomach acid reflux if you lie down immediately. Stomach acid backing up into the esophagus not only causes heartburn but also causes chest pain for a long time, which will lead to many other harmful problems.

In addition, eating at night also makes the stomach not rest. On the contrary, it has to work hard to become weaker and weaker. Furthermore, your body usually generates the stomach lining at night. Therefore, if you eat regularly at night, the mucosa will not be regenerated, becoming weaker and more prone to ulcers.

In particular, when sleeping, food is not fully digested, stagnation in the stomach is a favourable environment for bacteria to multiply. These bacteria irritate the mucosa, damaging the gut for a long time, causing ulcers, even stomach cancer.

 

Things to do:

• Going early to bed is the best way to avoid late-night eating.

• Eat dinner early, preferably before 19:00.

• If it is imperative to stay up late and hungry, you should avoid fast food, spicy food, greasy. But instead, eating light, easy-to-digest foods such as warm milk, banana, or 1 cup of honey mixed with warm water will help sleep better but less harmful to health.

 

Conclusion

Through the article, you have understood the harmful effects that affect your health when you eat late at night. You should limit and have a proper diet to avoid the harms of eating late at night. Should change to a healthier lifestyle to help your body better avoid cardiovascular diseases, obesity, weight gain.

Have you stopped eating at late nights yet?