A question of timing, not just calories
People who regularly ate after dinner or around bedtime had a 20% to 30% higher risk of liver disease than those who avoided late meals, according to a study led by Oregon Health & Science University. The conditions included metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, often called fatty liver disease, and cirrhosis, which involves extensive scarring of the liver.
The findings were published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Nearly 200,000 people over decades
The researchers pooled data from three long-running nationwide studies: the Nurses' Health Study, the Nurses' Health Study II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Together the datasets covered nearly 200,000 participants who reported on their eating habits, daily routines and other lifestyle factors.
The team sorted participants into groups by when they usually ate, then compared those patterns against reports of fatty liver disease and cirrhosis. The link held across the datasets.
Robert Wilechansky, a hepatologist at OHSU who specialises in liver transplantation and led the work, said a few earlier studies had hinted at the idea, but this is among the first long-term analyses to draw the connection to fatty liver disease explicitly.
What it does not prove
This is an observational study, so it shows an association rather than proof that late meals cause liver damage. People who eat late may differ in other ways that matter for liver health, including sleep, alcohol use and body weight, and the study design can only partly account for those differences.
Previous research has linked late-night eating to obesity and cardiovascular problems, which gives the new result a plausible mechanism: the liver and the body's metabolic clock run on a daily cycle, and food arriving at the wrong point in that cycle may be handled differently.
The practical advice is unglamorous. Keeping meals earlier and closing the kitchen after dinner is a low-cost change, and the researchers say it deserves a place alongside diet quality and exercise in the conversation about liver health.