While blood pressure should drop by at least 10 percent before you go to sleep, the researchers found that eating a meal interrupts this.
"A late dinner, the result of modern-day life, goes against our natural body clock," explained one of the researchers, Dr Nour Makarem.
"But our more demanding work schedules and commutes push everything later and now we are eating at unconventional times."
While this particular study did not look at men, similar studies on males have shown similar results.
Researchers at Harvard have found that men who regularly indulged in a "midnight snack" had a 55 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease than men who didn't.