Those delicious late night snackies may be bad for you. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle say that diabetics who eat lots of food in the evening are upping their risk of health complications. These experts sat down and interviewed 714 diabetes patients about their eating habits. Ten percent said they ate more than one-quarter of their daily food intake not at dinnertime, but after dinnertime. That means snacking after dinner, and getting up at night (even multiple times in the night) to sneak some late-night food treats - and we're not talking apples and oranges here. No, we're talking about snacks of the fatty and highly processed variety - the kinds of foods that give nutrition experts the night frights.

Seems that this little habit catches up with these patients in their declining health - they were two to three times more likely than the other patients in the study to be obese, to have poor blood sugar control or to have multiple diabetes-related complications, including the "biggies" - heart disease, and kidney and nerve problems. The cause? It seems that these patients are more likely than others to be suffering from depression. It appears that the late night eating is a coping mechanism. Researchers hope that access to therapy and antidepressants could help these people out.

The results of the study have been published in Diabetes Care (August 2006).