Episode Details

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Night shift doesn’t only disrupt when you sleep. It can completely change when you eat.

One day you’re eating dinner at six in the evening. The next, you’re having a main meal at two in the morning, eating breakfast after work and then trying to return to daytime meals on your days off.

Researchers call this “eating jet lag”: the difference between the timing of your eating window on workdays and days off.

In this episode, I examine a new study involving more than 104,000 adults. Among the male participants, each additional hour of eating jet lag was associated with a 14% higher risk of cardiovascular disease and a 21% higher risk of coronary heart disease. No significant association was detected among women.

This was an observational study and it was not conducted specifically in shift workers, so it cannot prove that changing meal times causes cardiovascular disease. But it raises an important question for anyone whose roster repeatedly shifts their eating across the day and night.

I also discuss a 2025 randomised laboratory trial examining daytime-only eating during simulated night work. The study found that people who ate across the day and night experienced changes in several cardiovascular risk markers. These changes were not seen in the daytime-eating group.

The trial was small and involved healthy people who were not actual shift workers. It does not prove that every night worker should fast throughout their shift. However, it adds controlled evidence that meal timing can influence how the cardiovascular system responds to circadian disruption.

In this episode, I cover:

• What eating jet lag means
• Why shift workers may experience large changes in meal timing
• How food helps regulate clocks throughout the body
• What the latest cardiovascular research found
• The important limitations of both studies
• Why overnight grazing can extend your eating window
• How to create more consistent meal-timing anchors
• Why workplaces share responsibility for supporting healthier eating patterns

The aim is not to create a perfect eating schedule. It is to understand your current pattern and reduce unnecessary changes where your roster and personal circumstances allow.

Start by recording the times of your first and last calories across several shifts and days off. That includes meals, snacks, energy drinks, soft drinks and milk or sugar added to coffee.

Your roster may force you to work against your biological clock. But with some planning, it does not have to control every part of when you eat as well.

If this episode helps, share it with a colleague who works nights.

Learn more about evidence-based shift work education, coaching and workplace programs at A Healthy Shift.

Scientific references

1. Le Folcalvez, X., Obeid, E., Palomar-Cros, A., et al. (2026). Eating jetlag based on meal timing discrepancies and risk of cardiovascular disease using the prospective cohort NutriNet-Santé. Communications Medicine, 6, 453.
2. Chellappa, S. L., Gao, L., Qian, J., et al. (2025). Daytime eating during simulated night work mitigates changes in cardiovascular risk factors: Secondary analyses of a randomized controlled trial. Nature Communications, 16, 3186.

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Roger Sutherland is Australia's Night Shift & Sleep Specialist and the founder of A Healthy Shif