The Time of Day You Eat Could Make a Difference to Your Mental Health

If you are grinding away at a job, your mental health can be at risk. The odds of developing depression or anxiety may be reduced by limiting your dining hours.

A disrupted internal body clock can affect an individual's mood and emotional well-being.

Studies show that our body won't fully adapt to the altered schedule after a long time on a roster of night shifts. The negative effects seem to be worse if a biological clock is disrupted.

30 percent of the global workforce are shift workers who make up nurses, security guards, and fire fighters, so how can we protect them from poor mental health?

Light therapies and melatonin are being looked at as possible solutions. Altered meal timing is being proposed by researchers.

Sarah Chellappa, who helped conduct the randomized trial while working at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, says the findings open the door for a novel sleep/circadian behavioral strategy.

"Our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that strategies that improve sleep and wake times can help promote mental health."

Evidence suggests that nighttime meals can interfere with metabolism because of the variability of hormones in the human body.

Shift workers have a higher body mass index and waist-to- hip ratio than daytime workers.

Mood disruption can be caused by a number of risk factors. Depression and obese people go hand in hand in a vicious cycle that increases the risk and severity of both conditions.

Researchers are trying to figure out if avoiding meals at night could improve the well-being of shift workers.

This is still an emerging area of research, but a recent trial suggests that limiting meals to the daytime could help prevent mood vulnerabilities.

Nineteen people were subjected to night work over the course of two weeks.

Half of the group only ate their meals during the day while the other half ate their meals during the night.

The trial included calories consumed, duration of sleep, physical activity and lighting conditions.

The authors found a 26 percent increase in depression-like mood levels and a 16 percent increase in anxiety-like moods when they were served meals at night. The group that only ate during the day did not report any changes in their moods.

The fact that people with the greatest degree of misalignment were more likely to show depression and anxiety-like symptoms is even more convincing.

The authors found that meal timing had moderate to large effects on depression-like and anxiety-like mood levels during simulations of night work.

They say that the findings offer a proof-of-concept demonstration of an evidence-based meal timing intervention that may prevent mood vulnerability in shift work settings.

Due to the experiment's design, the findings can't tell us how or why the timing of a meal affects shift workers' moods.

There is more research that needs to be done to find out if there could possibly be a role for night time diabetes. The results of a recent randomized trial show that only eating during daytime hours can prevent the development of diabetes.

There is room for future studies to look at how the gut microbiota can affect mental health.

When a biological clock is not aligned, the gut's microbiome can become unbalanced and promote inflammation.

Symptoms of anxiety and depression have been linked to altered gut flora.

Chellappa says that meal timing is an important aspect of nutrition.

The role of food intake on mental health is still being tested.

The study was published in a peer reviewed journal.