Late-night meals combined with a full twenty-four hours of sleep afterward have led to an augmented stress and increased chances of clotting.
With timing being everything, the scientists from Mass General Brigham want food timing to be part of the study toward heart health.
On April 8, the findings were published in the journal Nature Communications: daytime-only eating hours can protect heart and blood vessel health among those who have irregular timing, be it a day of awake hours or asleep-under-night-shift employees, from sleep disorders or jet lag from an ever-shifting time zone.
In their conclusion, the team ran a well-controlled experiment within the lab with 20 healthy volunteers who were divided into two groups: a control group whose participants ate during both daylight and nighttime shifts, with eating times according to realistic shifts of workers having various eating schedules, and an intervention group, which was eating only during daytime. They deprived the participants of windows, electronics, and watches for fourteen days; thereby, the body had indeed no idea, so to speak, of what the time of day was.
Day-night worked during the nights. During that phase of study, both groups were kept under the same nap cycle of days for measuring their sleep cycle. The only variance was the eating timings in between the two groups.
Types of changes in cardiovascular risk factors mentioned above were considered by the research, which controlled for every other conceivable factor that could impinge on those variables. "We can say the food timing effect is responsible." Sarah Chellappa, MD, MPH, PhD, associate professor, University of Southampton, and first author of the paper.
Some of the monitored variables affecting heart health and blood clotting risk included heart rate variability, which indicates changes in heart adaptation; plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 levels, a protein regulating blood clotting; heart rate; and levels of cortisol as indicators of stress.
Day-night evidence shows a lowered HRV in blood through PAI-1, which suggests it is on the brink of high-risk clotting.
This means eating in the daytime and not at night is probably good for the heart. It would imply that people who work during the day or have irregular sleeping hours would benefit from planning their meals around the day to decrease some cardiovascular risks.
"Our earlier investigations documented that circadian misalignment—the to-and-fro changes in our behavioral cycle with respect to our internal body clock—are risk enhancers for cardiovascular static risk factors," says senior author, Professor Frank A.J.L. Scheer, PhD, Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. "In this study, we would like to know what can minimize this risk, and we illustrate here that food timing could be a target."