Recent findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that the secret to maintaining a healthy weight could be as simple as turning off the lights at night.
Persistent exposure to light during the hours of darkness, it is claimed, changes your metabolism and makes you pile on the pounds without any change in the amount you eat.
The researchers found that staying up later often led to a change in eating habits with much more food eaten at night when the metabolism is slowing down. Exposing mice to a relatively dim light at night over eight weeks meant they gained more weight than other mice who experienced the normal light/dark cycle. Interestingly they were not eating more or less food – they were just eating at different times.
I find this extremely interesting because for some years we have thought that it didn’t matter at what time you ate within a 24 hour period. These findings suggest that there is a “right” time and a “wrong” time to eat and that weight gain is affected by sleep-weight cycles. I do know that many shift workers who come to see me would agree with these findings. For once, I find myself using a phrase that often makes me irritated, “More research is needed”.
Dr David Ashton
10th November 2010
