Bedtime snacks may spark weight-gain nightmare

Q. A friend is trying to convince me to avoid eating snacks at night because she says I’m sure to gain weight. While I’ve always tried hard to avoid becoming overweight, I say I should be fine as long as my total daily intake of calories is appropriate for my age, weight and activity level. She says she has heard that it doesn’t make any difference. Who’s right? I’d really miss my bedtime cookies and milk.

A. From personal experience, I’d say you are right, but unfortunately the weight of scientific evidence is not on my side.

I suppose I shouldn’t admit it, but I invariably have a bedtime snack that can range from soda and peanuts to occasionally pigging out on a double cheeseburger, fries and shake. Yet since high school 35 years ago, my weight has always stayed within the same 10-pound range. (Please, no hate mail.)

Apparently, however, I must be some kind of metabolic freak, because every recent study suggests my bad habit should have made me one of the 2 billion people in the world who are overweight or obese a long time ago. So you might want to chew on this before dismissing your friend’s concerns too quickly:

As you seem to know from personal experience, bedtime snacks tend to be of the high-fat, high-calorie variety, so people may wind up consuming more calories than they intended or even thought they did. This is bad enough during the day, but because you use even less energy in bed, more of this fat and sugar may wind up in your fat cells overnight, according to Lori Zanini, a dietitian and diabetes educator with HealthCare Partners medical group in California.

Yet even if you’re careful about counting calories, you still may find your weight starting to creep up. At Northwestern University, researchers found animals that were allowed to eat at night when they normally didn’t started to put on the pounds even if total daily calories remained roughly the same. Why? It probably threw off their natural circadian rhythms, the scientists speculate. Insulin, which regulates blood-sugar levels, seems to work on a daily cycle. At night, when you’re supposed to be sleeping and fasting, your body becomes resistant to the hormone, so habitually eating a meal or large snack will drive up your blood-sugar levels, potentially leading to weight gain, chronic insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes.

You especially want to rethink your late-night noshing if you find it is disrupting your sleep. Sometimes this is caused by stomach upset, but in some people a large intake of carbohydrates before bed can cause a “sugar crash” hours later, rousting a sufferer from sleep and leading to a night of tossing and turning. Either way, poor sleeping habits can trigger the production of food-craving hormones the next day while blocking those that tell you to stop eating. As a result, a 2007 article in the International Journal of Obesity found that people who ate most of their food at night usually had higher body mass indexes. And another study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that those who ate between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. gained more weight than those who did not.

Zanini told U.S. News & World Report that she recommends eating no later than 90 minutes before bedtime so that the food can be digested, although you can ignore this advice if you are truly hungry and not snacking out of habit or for comfort. Otherwise, you may experience even more intense cravings that can lead to unhealthy bingeing the next day. Still, instead of cookies or nachos, consider low-fat cottage cheese, yogurt or vegetables and hummus.

Yep, I may have to consider those.

Someday.

Q. Is there any place I can take 3 1/2-inch floppy disks to be recycled?

A. I remember buying my first computer from Radio Shack with its whopping 20 megabytes of memory. Everything I did had to immediately be stored on those truly floppy 5 1/4-inch disks that were barely protected by their flimsy cardboard sleeves. Then it was on to those smaller discs encased in plastic that could hold all of 2 megabytes, of which I have several boxes gathering dust myself. To use them now, I’d have to hook an external drive to my USB port, but I’m betting my computer wouldn’t even recognize most of the ancient software.

So the next time you’re in Belleville, you can dispose of these low-tech dinosaurs properly at the St. Clair Associated Vocational Enterprises, 620 N. Illinois St., where its electronic recycling program accepts everything from adding machines to zip drives (except for TVs). It’s free but remember that SAVE always appreciates donations to further its work helping those with developmental disabilities. For complete information, call 234-1992 or go to www.saveorg.org/electronics-recycling.

Today’s trivia

What beer is named for a mythical Chinese unicorn thought to be a symbol of good fortune?

Answer to Thursday’s trivia: Native to the Balkan region of southeastern Europe, the so-called horse chestnut tree earned its name because its buckeye-like seeds were thought to have curative powers in horses. As early as 1557, a Dr. Willem Quackelbeen in Istanbul wrote this to a colleague in Prague: “A species of chestnut is frequently found here, which has “horse” as a common second name because, devoured three or four at a time, (the horse chestnuts) give relief to horses sick with chest complaints, in particular cough and worm diseases.” Ironically, modern science has found that these seeds contain poisonous substances, so feeding them to horses is not advised. Nevertheless, the tree has become popular in countries with temperate climates, including the Netherlands, where Anne Frank mentioned one particular Amsterdam tree in her famous diary. This “Anne Frank Tree” blew over in August 2010, but 11 saplings, grown from the tree’s seeds, have been planted throughout the United States — including outside the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The seeds (and tree) also are known as conkers, which gave rise to an English children’s game in the 19th century.

This story was originally published July 17, 2015 at 9:52 AM with the headline "Bedtime snacks may spark weight-gain nightmare."