Harnessing Circadian Rhythms to Improve Health
Hello, friends!
I hope you're faring ok during this prolonged shelter-in-place. Please let me know if there is any way I can support you with herbal medicine or guidance to get through your weeks.
As you all know, I'm a voracious consumer of health information and I'm excited to tell you about some important findings I've recently learned about. Hang in there, this one is a little long, but I promise it's worth it.
Circadian Rhythms
Dr. Satchin Panda from the Salk Institute studies circadian rhythms. He and others have discovered that the timing of your daily activities (primarily, eating and sleeping) has a huge effect on your health.
In short, they found that WHEN YOU EAT matters more than WHAT YOU EAT. Yes, you heard that right. If you have an interest in sleeping better, losing weight, and avoiding chronic diseases including metabolic syndrome (diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol) then this information is crucial for you.
Dr. Panda found that organs and genes each have their own internal clocks. We typically think only of our sleep/wake clock, controlled by the hypothalamus, but it turns out that every gene has its own circadian clock. The clock of each gene and each organ is intended to be in sync on a regular 24-ish hour schedule. When our sleeping and eating timing is not on the body's desired schedule, many serious and chronic diseases can result.
So - what schedule does our body need? Here are Dr. Panda's key recommendations:
1. Restrict your eating to an 8-12 hour time window. The first non-water item you consume in the morning starts your eating clock, and the last non-water item you consume in the evening ends your eating clock. So for example, a 10-hour eating clock could be eating/drinking between 8am-6pm. Dr. Panda's research shows that eating within a 12-hour window is extremely supportive for health, and health outcomes are greatly improved if you can decrease the time window to 11, 10, or 9 or 8 hours. He recommends at least a 12-hour time-restricted window on most days, aiming for a few days a week during which you can achieve an 8-10 hour window of eating. (His team compared mice with access to a junk food diet 24 hours a day (those mice promptly developed obesity and diabetes), to mice with access to junk food only during an 8-12-hour time window. The latter mice were completely protected from obesity, diabetes, liver, and heart disease. Even sick mice placed on the time-restricted eating schedule had their diseases reversed, without medication or diet change!)
2. Finish all your eating, snacking, and non-water drinking 3-4 hours before going to sleep. Eating too close to bedtime, when your digestive clock is primed to shut down, means that calories are more likely to be stored as fat and food will move much more slowly through the digestive tract. Furthermore, the digestive backlog is likely to impair sleeping.
3. Maintain consistent hours between weekdays and weekends. Going to bed late on the weekends and then waking late actually messes with our circadian rhythms in the same way that jet lag does. As much as possible, maintain consistent waking and sleeping hours every day of the week. Erratic hours, aka "social jet lag" will throw off each organ's proper function.
If you're curious, Dr. Panda has an app (myCircadianClock) you can use to track your eating and sleeping habits.
In the next newsletter, I'll describe some more of Dr. Panda's research around the influence of natural and artificial light. Our body evolved to be highly responsive to light, and our access to it (and escape from it) affects not just sleep but also immune function, mood, and more. Stay tuned!
Please send me questions about this work if you'd like to understand more about how to put this content into practice. I'm so excited to support both your daily functioning and your long-term health with these lifestyle adjustments!
With love,
Janet
