Eating late in the day could be harmful in ways beyond impairing sleep and increasing caloric consumption. A new large study led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) suggests there may be a correlation between routinely snacking after dinner or bedtime and the risk of some liver diseases.
The study, which appeared in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, incorporated data from nearly 200,000 participants from three large prospective, longitudinal studies. They discovered that eating late in the day increased the risk of cirrhosis and MASLD by 20 per cent to 30 per cent.
The results provide another piece of evidence in a rapidly expanding area of scientific research exploring how meal timing affects health. While the quality of people’s diets and their levels of physical activity famously is important, scientists are exploring whether when they eat within the daily cycle is as well.
To explore their idea, the researchers pooled data from Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Those studies tracked eating patterns and later diagnoses of liver disease among 199,155 participants, with a median follow-up time of 16 years.
Once all other factors like age, body mass index, diet quality, calorie intake smoking alcohol consumption, physical activity, diabetes, and conditions that cause cholesterol abnormalities were taken into consideration, late-night eating still continued to be linked to increased risk of liver disease.
In the adjusted analysis, late night eaters had a 31% higher risk of MASLD and a 28% higher risk of cirrhosis. During the study, the researchers documented 4,477 cases of MASLD and 312 cases of cirrhosis.
These are relative differences in risk, not the likelihood that you will develop liver disease. They also do not prove that late-night eating causes either condition.
The liver is at the hub of the body’s metabolic activity, taking care of most of the processing of nutrients, blood sugar levels and energy storage. Many of these functions are attuned to the body’s circadian rhythms, our natural biological clock that optimizes metabolism to fit with our waking and sleeping hours.
A late dinner that’s eaten just before you go to sleep could mean that you’re consuming foods when your body is primed for sleep instead of being awake and active, which could negatively affect your body’s ability to process foods and burning calories.
While this concept is not new and has been linked to irregular eating habits and consuming food at night to metabolic issues, the exact biological pathways connecting eating at night to liver disease are not yet fully known.
Now, researchers at OHSU want to explore whether eating even earlier could provide benefits that can be observed in signs of a healthy liver without making people change what they eat.
MASLD is caused by fat build up in the liver in the presence of a metabolic risk factor. While most people experience little or no symptoms of the condition early on, a few suffer from inflammation and progressive liver damage.
The researchers stress that only a small percentage of individuals who have fatty liver disease develop into cirrhosis. The results from this study should not be interpreted to suggest that people who indulge in occasional night time eating will develop advanced liver disease.
