Eating when you should be sleeping may affect your brain. After a long day of work or a late night out, you might find yourself reaching for snacks when you should be hitting the sack. New research has found this sort of eating may disrupt learning and memory if it happens often enough. “In the experiment, the researchers allowed one group of mice to eat when they normally would, while mice in a second group could only munch during their normal sleep time. All of the rodents ate the same amount of food and slept the same amount of hours. After a few weeks of this, the mice were given learning tests. It turned out the mice that ate when they should have been sleeping were severely compromised in their ability to remember what they learned. They also had more trouble recognizing a new object and showed changes in their hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory.” The researchers say an occasional slip up probably isn’t a big deal. But their findings add to a growing body of evidence that chronically working nights can have serious health effects.

LEARN MORE