Eli5: why if you eat before bed your body isn’t more efficient in handling nutrients and use them to repair the body while you sleep?

Question

Eli5: why if you eat before bed your body isn’t more efficient in handling nutrients and use them to repair the body while you sleep?

In: Biology

Answer 1

To answer this question you need to realise that for the vast majority of human history we’ve struggled to get enough calories to survive. As a result our systems are optimised for taking every spare calorie and converting it into fat so that the next winter or dry season we didn’t starve to death.

Therefore the “efficient” use of nutrients (in terms of the vast majority of human history) is to store as many as possible and dole them out slowly over a longer period.