Team DailyPedia
Eating midnight snacks is not uncommon, specially in people who are used to sleeping in the wee hours of the morning. Aside from causing obesity in late-night snackers, a study found that midnight snacks can also be bad for the brain.
According to Adam Hoffman of the Smithsonian, a study where mice were fed with “misaligned” meals (meals fed at an unusual hour) showed that the mice’s brain’s ability to form new memories and learn new tasks became impaired.
The study, which has yet to be published, focused on looking at the issue of long-term sleep disruption since it has become very common.
Christopher Colwell, a professor from at the UCLA school of medicine said that when people’s circadian rhythms fall out of sync, like when people eat or snack at the time their body is not supposed to, there can cause memory deficits. “One of the consistent things we see in people who have disruptions in their circadian rhythms is memory deficits,” Colwell said.
Colwell and his team conducted the study using mice which are nocturnal. They fed the mice during the daytime and the results showed a disruption in their entire system.
The results of the study also showed that although the two groups of mice (one group was fed at the right time, the other group were fed with “misaligned” meals) slept the same amount of time, the group which were fed “misaligned” meals, their hippocampus, liver and adrenal glands shifted their functionality.
Colwell said, “We showed that under these eating conditions, some parts of the body, especially the hippocampus, are completely shifted in their molecular clock. So the hippocampus, the part of the brain which is so essential for learning and memory, is actually following when the food is available.”
Next, the researchers measured the effects of eating “misaligned” meals on the mice’s ability to learn and remember, the results showed “impaired learning and memory ability as compared to the aligned eaters.” The researchers then made another series of experiments which resulted in “significant cellular deficiencies in something called synaptic plasticity,” a process that is related to forming long-term memory.
On a final note, their research team is now highly interested in investigating how different kinds of diets affect the memory regardless of the time they are consumed.
“So many people, either because of work or because of diseases of the nervous system, are under situations where their biological clock is chronically disrupted. We think that we are uncovering a tool that we can use to either strengthen or weaken the clock, just by controlling when a person eats,” Colwell stated.
So before you grab a snack at midnight, think about what it can possibly do to your brain.
