Why eat a sugary meal right before going to bed?
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Food high in sugar is nutritionally good for short burst energy, and if not used up, that energy is stored as fat. Since people generally go to sleep after meals are they not wasting this potential short-release energy yield?
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Let’s consider instead that we eat dessert specifically to put on fat. Well, this may have been desirable as an outcome historically, but for a long time - maybe 200 years or so - humans have NOT wanted to build fat. Also - it doesn’t work. We burn fat during sleep, so those ‘dessert gains’ disappear.
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Now let us visit the simplest answer of “it tastes good” - well in that case, why do we eat dessert when we do? We could eat sugary snack at any point of the day - a dessert-lunch might make a lot of sense! So let me repeat myself:
Why eat a sugary meal right before going to bed?
I LOVE dessert foods, but I’m not a fan of dessert after a meal. Most meals I experience are over portioned as it is, there’s no need to add the least nutritional thing on top of it. To me it just seems like “let’s take the most enjoyable foods and eat them at the least enjoyable time.”
If we are having dessert at my house, which is typically reserved for special occasions, it is almost always an hour or so after we eat the meal.