Do night-shift nurses snack more than day nurses, or less? A new paper on 408 Italian nurses says both, and the reason turns out to be a division sum

Ask most people who snacks more, the nurse on days or the nurse on nights, and they will say nights. Long hours, a closed canteen, a vending machine down the corridor. A good deal of earlier research says the same. So a paper published online on 30 September 2026 in the journal Nursing Open, comparing the two groups among Italian nurses, looked at first like one more confirmation. Its summary reports 'a higher frequency of snacking' among nurses who work nights: 49.8%, against 22.3% of those who work days only.

Then you read on. Two sentences later, still in the summary, the paper says that nurses working daytime shifts reported higher snack consumption than their night-shift colleagues. The results section agrees with that second version and gives quite different numbers: 83% of day nurses said they ate between main meals, against 68% of nurses who also worked nights. The conclusion repeats it. One paragraph of the discussion, though, goes back to explaining 'higher snacking frequency among night shift nurses' with appetite hormones and disturbed body clocks.

So which is it? The paper's own table settles it, and shows where the confusion came from.

The study is a survey. In May 2022 a questionnaire was shared on Facebook and Instagram pages for Italian nurses, and 408 filled it in. Of those, 109 worked only mornings and afternoons, and 299 also worked nights, defined as 8 pm to 8 am. One question asked whether they ate snacks between their main meals, yes or no. In the day group 91 said yes. In the night group 203 said yes.

Ninety-one out of 109 is 83%. Two hundred and three out of 299 is 68%. Those are the figures in the table, and they are the right way to compare two groups of different sizes: each group against itself.

Now divide the same two counts by everybody who answered. Ninety-one out of 408 is 22.3%. Two hundred and three out of 408 is 49.8%. Those are the figures in the summary, to the decimal. They are not snacking rates at all. They mostly record that there were nearly three times as many night-shift nurses in the survey as day nurses, so there were more of them saying yes to almost anything.

The same slip appears in the figures on work experience. The summary says 8.1% of day nurses and 25.7% of night nurses had been in the job five years or less. The table has 33 and 105 nurses in those boxes, which is 30% and 35% of their own groups, a far smaller gap. Thirty-three and 105 out of 408 give exactly 8.1% and 25.7%.

Taking the table as the record, here is what the survey found. Day-only nurses were more likely to say they snack between meals (83% against 68%), and that difference was statistically clear. The number of meals a day did not differ between the groups. Regular mealtimes were a little more common among day nurses, 62% against 52%, which fell just short of the usual statistical threshold. Body weight did not differ clearly either, although 13% of the night group had a body mass index in the obese range against 6% of the day group. Scores on a questionnaire about how flexible people are around food, exercise and body shape were about the same.

Even the corrected finding is thin. 'Do you eat between main meals, yes or no' says nothing about what was eaten, how much, or when. An apple at 4 pm and a packet of biscuits at 4 am both count as a yes, and a night-shift nurse whose whole eating day is upside down may not think of anything as 'between meals'. The nurses chose to answer a social-media post, so they are not a cross-section of Italian nursing. Height and weight were self-reported. The paper reports no results adjusted for age or years in the job, and the night group included both fixed and rotating schedules, which the authors themselves list as a weakness. They call the work a preliminary contribution, and it is.

None of this is a scandal. The table is there in the open-access paper for anyone to check, and the conclusion follows it. But a reader who stops at the summary, as most readers and most search tools do, comes away with a result that points the wrong way and looks twice as big. The practical lesson is cheap and it applies well beyond nursing journals: when a study compares two groups, find the table, find the count and the group size, and do the division yourself.