Skipping breakfast can directly affect your heart. Know what other meal mistake you shouldn't make

In our hectic day-to-day routine, we often delay breakfast or skip it entirely. Dinner is an even bigger victim of this, either getting delayed because of late-night shifts or axed entirely because of people skipping meals in order to lose weight. However, a new clinical study, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows this might do more harm than good. More than 100k adults were made part of a large-scale clinical trial coordinated by French organization EREN.

The study, referred to informally as the NutriNet-Santé study, concluded that adults who delay the first meal of the day significantly increase their risk of cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, this risk increased by approximately six percent for every additional hour of delay. Adults who had late dinner often also engaged consciously in behaviors that have been known to harm cardiovascular health, such as binge drinking, smoking, excessive caffeine consumption, and the like. Eating the last meal of the day post-9 PM had a 28% higher risk of increasing cardiovascular and cerebrovascular risk factors, and the likelihood of having a heart attack, compared to eating the last meal of the day by 8 PM or prior. Oddly enough, the study was inconclusive on any correlation between the frequency of meals and an increase or decrease in risk factors for cardiovascular health.

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