Eating late? read this


Now fight back your late-night craving for snacks. You don’t really want it after having dinner. Yes, you are not hungry.
Taking in at night more carbohydrates, saturated fats and refined sugar than you already have during the day is harmful.
Aside from piling on fat, it would alter your brain physiology, say researchers at Semel Institute in the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The hippocampal area of your brain might suffer from it, causing deficiency in learning and memory.
Hippocampus governs both long-term memory and the ability to recognise a novel object.
Also, it helps us associate senses and emotional experiences with memory, while organise and store new memories.
Having regularly fed mice late at night, the researchers found the rodents’ ability to recognize a novel object diminished. The habit impaired their long-term memory as well.
The habit impairs a protein called CREB (cAMP response element-binding protein) that help regulate the body’s circadian clock, ability to learn and memory, reports say.
A less active CREB means decreased memory, which might play a role in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Since many people find themselves working or playing during times when they’d normally be asleep, it is important to know that this could dull some of the functions of the brain”, says Dawn Loh from the UCLA Laboratory of Circadian and Sleep Medicine.
The findings haven’t yet been confirmed in humans.
However, the study confirms that shift workers perform less well in cognitive tests.