Digestion While Sleeping and Cognitive Decline.
Is it good to have a midnight snack? How about eating just before bed? The science reveals that the best thing may be to go to bed with our food digested. It may seem hard in the beginning but over time you get totally used to it.
Today, we are going to be talking about eating late or having food in your stomach digesting food while you should be sleeping. Scientists at the University of California were doing a study specifically on mice. What they did is they had two groups, the controlled group and the experimental group. What they did with these groups was the controlled group would eat its food at the normal time when it was awake. The other group, on the other hand, what they would do was they would make them be awake when they should be sleeping and then they would feed them so that they would be digesting food while they were sleeping. Now what was the result? What they did was, after doing this for a time, they put the mice in a new environment…both groups. In that new environment, they were given an electric shock. Now what was the result? Later, they put those mice from both groups back into that environment where they had been shocked and what happened was the group that was eating when it should be eating, they were fearful because they remembered being in that situation and they remembered the shock. The other group though, when they were put in that environment, they didn’t show much of a fear response, indicating to scientists that their memory had actually been impaired and the scientists said that eating late or having food in our stomachs while we should be sleeping actually can negatively impact our long-term memory. Now it’s interesting because we see in the book, Healthy Living, “The stomach, when we lie down to rest, should have its work all done, that it may enjoy rest, as well as other portions of the body. The work of digestion should not be carried on through any period of the sleeping hours.” So what can we do? One of the things that we can do is eat our last meal early enough that it is digested by the time we go to bed. This may help our memory in the long term.
