The team worked with 20 healthy and young participants during a two-week period.
Eating only during the daytime could help protect shift workers from risks to their heart health, according to a new study.
Scientists from the University of Southampton and Mass General Brigham in the United States say previous research had shown that working night shifts can lead to “serious” cardiovascular health risks.
They say that their study, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides evidence that by eating only in the daytime, shift workers can avoid some of the risks.
The team worked with 20 healthy and young participants during a two-week period during which they had no access to windows or watches to study the effect of circadian misalignment on their body functions.
For the study, the participants stayed awake for 32 hours in a dimly lit environment, maintaining constant body posture and eating identical snacks every hour.
And after participating in simulated night work, they were assigned to either eating during the nighttime, as most night workers do, or only during the daytime.
The researchers then examined the after-effects of the food timing on participants’ cardiovascular risk factors – including autonomic nervous system markers, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (which increases the risk of blood clots), and blood pressure.
They found that these risk factors were unaffected for those who eat during the daytime.
Professor Frank Scheer, a professor of medicine and director of the Medical Chronobiology Programme at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said: “Our prior research has shown that circadian misalignment – the mistiming of our behavioural cycle relative to our internal body clock – increases cardiovascular risk factors.
“We wanted to understand what can be done to lower this risk, and our new research suggests food timing could be that target.”
Dr Sarah Chellappa, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, and lead author, said: “Our study controlled for every factor that you could imagine that could affect the results, so we can say that it’s the food timing effect that is driving these changes in the cardiovascular risk factors.”
