Hunger is one of the most fascinating components of our
process of eating. We eat because we need food, but beyond the principle and
process of consuming food it is hunger that really tells us that our body needs
food and when. We all feel it at some point, but hunger is something that can
be trained just like any muscle in the human body. Hunger is usually somewhat
predictable, often associated with a certain amount of time between meals, but
sometimes there is just a moment where the hunger hits you like a bomb and you
have just got to eat something! More and more, we are seeing that this
spur-of-the-moment hunger is happening late at night, and we are suffering for
it.
Our culture is becoming more and more atypical in its
sleeping patterns and activity within the 24-hour day. Before the advent of
electricity, people went to bed when the sun went down for the most part. Then,
electricity was still so expensive that people rarely used it unless it was
absolutely necessary. Then, the TV came around and people watched it as long as
programming was on, after which it automatically switched to blank white noise
and everyone went to bed. Then came late night TV, then movies could be watched
at anytime of the day, then the internet’s 24/7 availability became public, and
eventually people were able to do almost anything in the middle of the night
that they could do in the light of day. People have always worked the
“graveyard shift” at factories and warehouses and such, but these used to be
the exception. Now, kids, parents, anyone and everyone are staying up until
they feel like going to bed. Not only are they now active and awake, but they
are also getting hungry (D’Arrigo).
Now this doesn’t seem like it should be any different than
snacking during the day, but there are several factors that are deep-set and
subconsciously controlled in our bodies that make these late night snacks a
no-no. The overarching control of our bodies’ involuntary actions during sleep
is something called a circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms are the regulators of
how our body produces and expends energy, and control this ebb and flow
depending on what we eat and the activity we conduct (“Northwestern”). Since we
are sleeping, there is very little activity to burn off calories while we
sleep. Digesting food takes time, and when we digest food while we are awake
the extra activity burns off calories from the very food that is being digested
and put back into your cells to power them. Digesting food while you are
asleep, however, has no activity to burn up extra calories and more and more of
it is stored in fat where it cannot burn off until activity is resumed. It is
in this way that circadian rhythms can be much higher during higher activity
during the day, but taper off and do a less efficient job of turning food to energy
and storing excess during sleep (D’Arrigo).
The idea for the experiment conducted by Northwestern
University came from the observation of “shift workers,” or those that work
shifts from sundown to sunset (“Northwestern”). Within most sampling pools, the
workers that worked late shifts were almost always more obese or heavier than
their counterparts that worked the same job during the day. An experiment was
then conducted on mice. Using a minimum sustenance baseline diet as a control,
the researchers then gave the mice a fat-heavy diet during normal waking hours,
and a 20% increase above baseline consumption was noted. The same fat-heavy
diet was applied 12 hours off, during the most extreme cycle typically
associated with sleeping. After this application, a 48% increase above baseline
was noted despite using identical mice and identical diet (“Northwestern”).
Terry D’Arrigo uses the examples of Cliff Huxtable, Dagwood
Bumstead, and Charlie Brown’s Snoopy to display the humor and affinity to late
night snacking in our American pop culture: “The midnight snack seems to be an American
institution,” he observed. “Night-Eating
Syndrome” is even a widely recognized condition by psychologists who defined it
as night-snacking more than three times a week (D’Arrigo). It was found that
those who have night-eating syndrome are more than 2.5 times as likely to have diabetes
than those who do not.
So, it is not just as simple as X number of calories in, X
number of calories out no matter how or when they are consumed. Just like our
bodies tell us when we need sleep, they also tell us (and in a somewhat related
way) that eating should happen in 3 or 4 regular times during the day, and sleeping
time is recovery time, not food binging time!
D’Arrigo, Terry. “Snack Attack.” American Diabetes Association. 60.10 (2007): 20. Web.
Anon. “Northwestern University; That Late Night Snack: Worse
Than You Think.” News RX Health and
Science. NewsRX, 2009. Web.
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