People who have food dilemmas may be suffering from mental health, according to a recent study. Liberty Voice reports that the connection between food habits and mental health is especially in focus during National Eating Disorders Week in the U.S., which runs from February 23 to March 1.

Experts have long known that mental illnesses and eating disorders are strongly linked. With 50% of individuals with eating disorders also suffering clinical depression, notes Liberty Voice, it's no surprise that a recent study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that nocturnal eating may well be a telltale sign of mental illness.

Fox News reports that a research team discovered that one strong symptom of a rare eating disorder is excessive eating at night. Researchers from the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, Stanford University and The Children's Hospital in Philadelphia examined the mental health profiles and eating habits of 1,600 students from 10 U.S. universities and found that 4% of the subjects manifested night eating disorder symptoms.

Dr. Rebecka Peebles, lead author of the study, told Reuters Health, "Night eating syndrome is characterized not only by eating at night - certainly many college students might have a late night study fest with eating - but it's also characterized by other things, like feeling that you can't eat in the morning, and feeling like you have to eat in order to go back to sleep."

However, Peebles cautions that this discovery must be further studied as there is an overlap between binge eating and night eating. She said, "Our study helped extend findings of previous studies that have not been controlling for binge eating," she says in the Reuters Health report.

"We know that binge eating and night eating have a pretty moderate overlap so a lot of people who come into the clinic for night eating often have binge eating. We think night eating is something to be aware of even though it only occurs in just under 3 percent of the students after controlling for binge eating, so it's still a pretty important entity," she adds.

Night eating disorder is a distinct diagnosis in the newest psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), says Reuters Health. This particular disorder causes the afflicted patient to have increased appetite at night, but is quite different from binge eating as the patient does not voraciously consume food at night but just do some "grazing" on food all evening, with the patient waking up at night just to eat, believing that the act may prompt him or her to get back to sleep.

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