Planning meals and snacks in advance and eating breakfast every day may help lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, new guidelines from US doctors say. Eating more calories earlier in the day and consuming less food at night may also reduce the odds of a heart attack, stroke or other cardiac or blood vessel diseases, according to the scientific statement from the American Heart Association.
"When we eat may be important to consider, in addition to what we eat," said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, chair of the group that wrote the guidelines and a nutrition researcher at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
As many as 30 percent of U.S. adults may routinely skip breakfast, a habit that has become more common in recent years as more people snack throughout the day instead of sitting down for three traditional meals, St-Onge and colleagues note in the journal Circulation.
When people do eat breakfast daily, they're less likely to have risk factors for cardiovascular disease like high cholesterol and elevated blood pressure. And people who skip this morning meal are more likely to have risk factors like obesity, poor nutrition and diabetes or high blood sugar.
That's because meal timing may affect health by impacting the body's internal clock. We may not process sugars as well at night as we do during the day, and studies of shift workers have linked this schedule with a greater risk of obesity and heart disease than a typical day job, St-Onge said by email.
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