Late Dinner Or Snack At Midnight Close To Bedtime Increase Risk Of Breast Cancer'

Eating an early dinner and forgoing midnight snacks may reduce the risk of breast cancer, researchers claim.

Increasing the time spent fasting overnight helps bring down blood sugar levels, which scientists think could slash the chance of developing the disease.

Tests on women found that those who regularly did not eat between their evening meal and the next morning’s breakfast had significantly better control over their glucose levels.

And the longer the period they spent without food, the more stable their blood sugar.

Study author Catherine Marinac, of San Diego School of Medicine in the US, said that advising women not to snack after dinner is a simple message which could have a significant impact.

‘Increasing the duration of overnight fasting could be a novel strategy to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer,’ she said. ‘This is a simple dietary change that we believe most women can understand and adopt. It may have a big impact on public health without requiring complicated counting of calories or nutrients.’

The scientists, who presented their findings at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in Philadelphia yesterday, studied data from 2,212 women. 

Their paper, which is published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, showed that each three-hour increase in night-time fasting was associated with a 4 per cent lower blood glucose level, regardless of how much the women ate at other times.

A growing body of experts believe that keeping blood sugar stable can cut the risk of hormonally driven cancers such as breast cancer.

This may be because glucose provides fuel for rapidly dividing cancer cells. And insulin – the hormone that is pumped into the blood to remove excess glucose – is also thought to stimulate the growth of the disease.

Snacking between meals means blood sugar frequently spikes, and insulin is released to bring it down to normal levels.

Last night Tom Stansfeld, Cancer Research UK’s health information officer, said diet can affect cancer risk, but warned against drawing too many conclusions from the US study as it only looked at blood glucose and did not establish a link to cancer. 

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