Why eat a sugary meal right before going to bed?
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Food high in sugar is nutritionally good for short burst energy, and if not used up, that energy is stored as fat. Since people generally go to sleep after meals are they not wasting this potential short-release energy yield?
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Let’s consider instead that we eat dessert specifically to put on fat. Well, this may have been desirable as an outcome historically, but for a long time - maybe 200 years or so - humans have NOT wanted to build fat. Also - it doesn’t work. We burn fat during sleep, so those ‘dessert gains’ disappear.
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Now let us visit the simplest answer of “it tastes good” - well in that case, why do we eat dessert when we do? We could eat sugary snack at any point of the day - a dessert-lunch might make a lot of sense! So let me repeat myself:
Why eat a sugary meal right before going to bed?
There’s some logic in putting it last. First make sure you get nutritious food. Once you have, you can safely enjoy some indulgence. Number one, it won’t displace actual nutrition, because you took care of that first. And second, you’re more likely to indulge moderately because you filled up on real food first.
So if there is any method here, I think it’s to put dessert last, not to put dessert before bed.
However none of this explains why, after a meal, I immediately get sugar cravings.