Do Evening Snacks Make You Fat?

Posted February 11, 2008 at 02:00 PM by Caroline Shannon

Section: Her Health, Her Nutrition, Diet Myths, Healthy Eating, Weight Control

If milk and cookies are your favorite bedtime snack, you may just be in luck.

While there seems to be mixed opinion as to whether or not midnight noshing will put on the pounds, many nutritional experts agree that this is simply not the case.

Instead, nutritionist Monica Reinagel said, the slight changes that may hormonally affect “how calories are metabolized or stored at different times of the day” have been hugely exaggerated when it comes to their actual impact on weight control.

“What matters in terms of weight control are how many calories you take in and burn over the course of the entire day,” said Reinagel, author of The Inflammation Free Diet Plan. “When you eat them doesn’t seem to matter in any significant way.” Jackie Keller, founding director of Los Angeles-based healthy food company, NutriFit, said she agrees with the notion that food consumption is more about how much versus when women are munching.

“While we are more metabolically active in the earlier hours of the day, weight gain is much more a function of what and how much you eat, as opposed to when you eat,” said Keller, who is also the author of Body After Baby: A Simple, Healthy Plan to Lose Your Baby Weight Fast. “As long as at the end of the week, you’ve burned more than you’ve taken in, you’ll lose weight.”

Reinagel, explained that if a woman wanted to have a 200-calorie snack after dinner, it wouldn’t matter whether she ate that snack at 7 p.m. or 9 p.m.  For that matter, she said, it would not make a difference for weight control whether she ate her 500-calorie dinner at 6 p.m. or 11 p.m.

“The real problem is that evening snacking tends to be mindless,” said Reinagel, who is also the chief nutritionist for NutritionData.com. “You sit down in front of the television and before you know it, you’ve eaten 800 calories worth of chips or ice cream. 

“It’s those 800 empty calories that are contributing to weight gain, not the fact that you ate them after 8 p.m.”

But Dr. Ann Kulze, founder of Just Wellness in S.C., says there are a few benefits to eating more calories earlier in the day instead of at night. According to Kulze, a recent issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology featured a study in which Cambridge scientists followed more than 6,700 adults, ages 40 to 75, for a period of about 7 years. The researchers found that although everyone gained some weight over time, people who consumed a larger share of their calories at breakfast gained less weight. What’s more, those who ate 22 percent to 50 percent of their calories at breakfast gained about 35% less weight over the study period versus those who ate no more than 11 percent of their total calories at breakfast.

Kulze, who is also the author of Dr. Ann’s 10-Step Diet, said there are several reasons why this eating pattern may effectively curb weight gain, including:

1.) Of all meals, breakfast typically provides foods of higher nutritional quality, which have a favorable impact on metabolism. 2.) Metabolic rates tend to be a bit higher early in the day. 3.) Calories consumed in the morning have a greater chance of being burned through physical activity. 4.) The early morning feeding tends to have a positive influence on insulin sensitivity and appetite control over the course of the day.

But Kulze makes a point to add that, “Although there is no black and white cut-off like exactly at 8:00 PM the metabolism slows,” the above reasons show why it may be best to limit what you eat at night. And when it comes to choosing something a bit lighter in the evening, Keller and Reinagel said there are advantages that do not necessarily have to do with weight control, including the avoidance of heart burn and uneasy digestion.

“Additionally, too much food, especially heavy food, can interfere with comfortable sleep,” Keller said.

Reinagel said in her house, she and her family try to restrict evening snacks to lighter foods, like air-popped popcorn, and control their portions.

“No taking the bag of chips or carton of ice cream to the TV room,” Reinagel said. “Serve yourself a reasonable portion in the kitchen and put the rest away.”

And, eating fewer calories, Reinagel said, is sometimes all it takes.

“Having a cut-off point in the evening may be helpful for weight control, but it’s a behavioral strategy, not a metabolic phenomenon,” she said.