When to Stop Eating Before Bed
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What time should you stop eating before bed for better heart health?
You work hard to strike the right amount of intelligence and ignorance. The Last Show with David Cooper. Midnight Snackers, brace yourselves. There's new research that suggests your late night romantic relationship with your fridge might be messing with your heart. Turns out when you eat could matter almost as much as what you eat. Wait, are you telling me that bedtime pizza is medically suspicious? I am here with someone to discuss just this. Her name is Jess Cording. She's a dietician, health coach, and author. Jess, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me.
I feel like eating before bed is something I don't do only because I brush my teeth. And after I do that midnight teeth brush, it's my natural food cutoff. But a lot of people do it. Is there anything wrong with it? Like, would health advice tell you to not snack before bed?
That is such a great question.
How does late-night eating affect your cardiovascular health?
And it's one that I get a lot in my work as an RD. And what I can say is the research does suggest that it's a good idea to limit that late night eating.
And what sort of thing is it all created equally? Like if I eat a bag of chocolate versus, I don't know, a handful of kale, is bed eating or midnight eating bad no matter what you eat or is different things hit you differently?
Love that question. And to be honest, I do believe that it does depend what you eat. There is still something there. But what the research suggests is that when we don't give ourselves enough time to digest before we lie down for the day, that's been shown to negatively impact cardiometabolic health. Things related to our heart health, sleep quality, blood sugar regulation, that when we're eating too close to bedtime, no matter what it is, just that alone does seem to negatively impact health. But to your point, I think there's a huge difference between like an entire pizza versus like, you know, a little bit of salad or a bowl of cereal or something like that.
You know, when I was first thinking about this topic, I thought like maybe weight gain and things like that. I'm surprised to hear heart health can be affected by before bed eating. Say more about what's going on there. Maybe the mechanism or what do we think about that?
Sure. Well, you're not wrong about weight gain, first off. That can also impact heart health. But, you know, we're looking at things like blood pressure, blood sugar, which is more specific to, we're talking about the diabetes risk, for example, but it's all connected. And then the brain health piece of the picture, like if our blood vessels to our heart are not in great shape due to lifestyle habits, that's going to negatively impact our brain function. So it's all connected. So that's why if you hear like cardio metabolic, it's not just about the heart. It's about our whole body system.
Got it. Now, what is the magic cutoff? Like what is the number of hours before bed that I should really limit my eating? If I'm going to have a big old dinner, how close to bedtime should that be?
I'm glad you phrased it that way because so often I'm asked, what time should you stop eating? And that is so variable because what if somebody works the night shift, right? And their bedtime is a totally different time of day.
What types of foods are better or worse for late-night snacking?
Or what if someone's going to bed really early or they don't get home until late? What I tend to recommend based on the literature is aiming for two to three hours of when you finish dinner to when you go to sleep.
Good. I'm happy with what I do. I'm not doing anything wrong because I do that. What is nocturnal dipping in blood pressure? And how does this relate to this whole topic?
Yeah. So what can happen is if your blood sugar drops overnight, that could be very disruptive to sleep. That's when you may find that you're waking up in the middle of the night, like really disoriented or hungry and needing a snack again. Yeah. But sometimes that's precipitated by a steep increase in blood sugar and then it drops pretty quickly. So you're going to see that more often if you are eating, say, like really high sugar, high carbohydrate foods, maybe without enough protein, fat and or fiber to slow down that digestive process.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What time should you stop eating before bed for better heart health?
0:05–0:59
2
How does late-night eating affect your cardiovascular health?
0:59–3:05
3
What types of foods are better or worse for late-night snacking?
3:05–9:56
4
How many hours before bed should you stop eating?
9:56–12:33
5
What is nocturnal dipping in blood pressure and why is it important?
12:33–18:52
Speakers
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