The late-night eating habit that may throw your gut health into chaos - KSL.com

ATLANTA — If stress causes your digestive woes, eating late at night isn't doing you any favors.For thousands of participants in new, early research, those eating more than 25% of one's daily calories after 9 p.m. while stressed were as much as 2.5 times more likely to have abnormal bowel habits like constipation or diarrhea.The research is an abstract that hasn't yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, but was presented in May at Digestive Disease Week, a prestigious annual meeting for professionals in gastroenterology, hepatology and related fields. The research was also observational, as all data points were measured at one point in time, so it doesn't prove a causal relationship between stress, nighttime eating and gut health."I'm a person who myself eats a lot of times late at night, so it was just out of curiosity, and I couldn't find a lot of articles about it," said lead author Dr. Harika Dadigiri, explaining why she conducted the investigation. Most research on the health effects of late-night eating center on sleep, diabetes, obesity and acid reflux or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease).Dadigiri and her coauthors analyzed the health data of 11,149 participants from the 2005 to 2010 cohort of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The researchers also included more than 4,100 patients from the 2013 to 2017 period of the American Gut Project, now called the Microsetta Initiative. More recent data didn't have all the details the authors wanted, said Dadigiri, who is also a resident physician at New York Medical College at Saint Mary's General Hospital and Saint Clare's Denville Hospital, both in New Jersey."Few prior studies have explored the timing of meals, or the combination of stress with late-night eating, on bowel function," said Dr. Geoffrey Preidis, associate professor of pediatrics in the division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, via email."This is important because stress and excess late-night eating often go hand in hand," Preidis, who wasn't involved in the research, added.Meal timing and the gutIn the new research, the authors defined chronic physiological stress by participants' composite allostatic load score — which involves eight cardiovascular, metabolic and inflammatory biomarkers, such as blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index.Late-night eatin