The late-night eating habit that may throw your gut health into chaos – CTV
June 08, 2026
If stress causes your digestive woes, eating late at night isn’t doing you any favours.
For thousands of participants in new, early research, those eating more than 25 per cent of one’s daily calories after 9 p.m. while stressed were as much as 2.5 times more likely to have abnormal bowel habits like constipation or diarrhea.
The research is an abstract that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, but was presented in May at Digestive Disease Week, a prestigious annual meeting for professionals in gastroenterology, hepatology and related fields. The research was also observational, as all data points were measured at one point in time, so it doesn’t prove a causal relationship between stress, nighttime eating and gut health.
“I’m a person who myself eats a lot of times late at night, so it was just out of curiosity, and I couldn’t find a lot of articles about it,” said lead author Dr. Harika Dadigiri, explaining why she conducted the investigation. Most research on the health effects of late-night eating centre on sleep, diabetes, obesity, and acid reflux or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease).
