New York: Late-night meals may interfere with your memory, a new study has warned.
The study in mice found that eating during times of day when one would normally be sleeping impaired the animals' memory for objects they had seen, even when the rats got the same amount of sleep as mice on a normal eating and sleeping schedule.
Study co-author Christopher Colwell, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and a team of researchers acclimatised mice to a normal sleep schedule, sleeping during the day. Mice are nocturnal, so they are normally awake at night and asleep during the day.
Then, the researchers allowed some of the animals to eat only during the time they were typically asleep, while allowing others to eat when the animals would normally be awake, LiveScience reported.
The mice on the misaligned eating schedule had shifted sleep times, but they still slept for the same total amount of time, ate the same amount of food and weighed the same as the mice that ate at normal times, Christopher Colwell added.
After putting the animals on different feeding schedules, the researchers placed them in the box with one of the familiar objects and one new object, and measured how long the mice spent exploring each one.
