You Should Eat Dinner No Later Than 7pm, Doctors Warn - Here’s Why
If you’re in the habit of eating your evening meal late at night, you might want to reconsider - it’s putting you at risk of heart attacks, doctors have warned.
Experts have said that you should eat dinner before 7pm to allow the body time to wind down and rest.
Eating late can do more damage to the heart than having a diet high in salt, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Having dinner within two hours of going to bed can leave the body on “high alert” and mean blood pressure does not fall properly overnight, increasing the risk to the heart.
Cardiologists at a Turkish university studied more than 700 men and women with high blood pressure to establish what difference eating times and the consistency of their diet had on their health.
Eating dinner later was found to have the most significant impact on blood pressure during the night, with those doing so almost twice as likely to suffer from “non-dipper hypertension”, when pressure fails to drop properly overnight.
Blood pressure is meant to fall by 10%, but almost 25% of those who ate dinner within two hours of going to bed did not experience their pressure falling sufficiently overnight, compared with 14.2% who ate earlier.
Dr Ebru Ozpelit, associate professor of cardiology at Dokuz Eylul University in Imir, said modern life and things such as artificial lighting meant people are more likely to eat later in the day and take up “erratic” eating habits.
She told the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Rome: ‘We must define the ideal frequency and timing of meals because how we eat may be as important as what we eat.’
