Breakfast skipping and late-night eating (after 7PM) linked to poorer metabolic health | Ruth Patterson
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Circadian rhythms modulate a wide array of physiological processes, including the body’s production of hormones that regulate sleep, hunger, metabolism, and others, ultimately influencing body weight, performance, and susceptibility to disease. Coordination of meal timing with the circadian rhythm can affect metabolic health, including glucose regulation and insulin sensitivity. Long periods without food allow the digestive system to rest and may be necessary for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Finishing eating earlier in the day can have more of a benefit than the same eating window shifted later in the day. In this clip, Dr. Ruth Patterson discusses how skipping breakfast and eating late into the evening may contribute to worse metabolic health.
Rhonda: Yeah, and so I mentioned to you earlier that I talked about this meal timing with a collaborator of yours, Dr. Satchin Panda who is at the Salk Institute. And, you know, a lot of his research had focused on elucidating this important regulator of the peripheral clocks, meaning the clocks in the non-brain, so the liver, the heart...
Ruth: Pancreas, right.
Rhonda: Right. And how, when you eat your first meal or even taking your first non-water beverage starts that clock. And so, if you start that clock, let's say you wake up at 7:30 in the morning and you have a sip of coffee, 7:30 in the morning the clock starts. And he's shown that eating all your meals within at least a 12 hour time from that when that clock starts seems to be very important for, you know, having a good metabolic health.
Ruth: Right.
Rhonda: You know, good glucose regulation, good insulin sensitivity, being able to maintain, you know, lean muscle mass and keep fat loss off. But what's really in my mind, I was trying to understand, and like you mentioned, we don't know all the molecular mechanisms between the timing of the two, both the master clock and the peripheral clock, but how they do seem to be working together. So, you know, let's say someone fasts in the morning, they don't eat breakfast, they don't eat lunch. And then, so they're fasting, let's say, they're fasting for 12 hours and then they eat a meal right before bed.
Ruth: Right.
Rhonda: We don't know if that's necessarily going to be as good as fasting during the evening in sync.
Ruth: We totally don't think it's as good. You know, so our research seems to show that two things, one we see great...our biggest reductions in breast cancer, for instance, recurrence, with at least 13 hours of fast. And we really believe that fast needs to start around 7 maybe to 8 p.m. at night. When people talk about breakfast, what I often say is, when you're talking to people who skip breakfast, I think skipping breakfast is actually a marker of eating at night. Because if you stop eating early in the evening and don't eat for 13 hours, when you wake up you're starving. You don't skip breakfast. So a lot of times, I think the research showing that not eating breakfast or skipping breakfast is bad, is actually not studying breakfast, it's the people who skip breakfast were eating late into the night. So we think it's both, it's that we need a long stretch of time and there might be some improvements in gut rest or the microbiome. Like, we don't think that your GI tract also was meant to have food constantly in there, you know? So we think it's important to have a long stretch of gut rest but that that gut rest happens at night, starting fairly early, 7 or 8 p.m. and then 13 hours after that. So it's both of those things, either one is not sufficient.
Rhonda: And the microbes in your gut are also on that circadian rhythm.
Ruth: Absolutely. Oh, yes, the GI tract is very, very tied to circadian controls.
Rhonda: Right.
The body’s 24-hour cycles of biological, hormonal, and behavioral patterns. Circadian rhythms modulate a wide array of physiological processes, including the body’s production of hormones that regulate sleep, hunger, metabolism, and others, ultimately influencing body weight, performance, and susceptibility to disease. As much as 80 percent of gene expression in mammals is under circadian control, including genes in the brain, liver, and muscle.[1] Consequently, circadian rhythmicity may have profound implications for human healthspan.
- ^ Dkhissi-Benyahya, Ouria; Chang, Max; Mure, Ludovic S; Benegiamo, Giorgia; Panda, Satchidananda; Le, Hiep D., et al. (2018). Diurnal Transcriptome Atlas Of A Primate Across Major Neural And Peripheral Tissues Science 359, 6381.
A gene encoding a transcription factor (CLOCK) that affects both the persistence and period of circadian rhythms. CLOCK functions as an essential activator of downstream elements in the pathway critical to the generation of circadian rhythms. In humans, polymorphisms in the CLOCK gene have been associated with increased insomnia, weight loss difficulty, and recurrence of major depressive episodes in patients with bipolar disorder.
A peptide hormone secreted by the beta cells of the pancreatic islets cells. Insulin maintains normal blood glucose levels by facilitating the uptake of glucose into cells; regulating carbohydrate, lipid, and protein metabolism; and promoting cell division and growth. Insulin resistance, a characteristic of type 2 diabetes, is a condition in which normal insulin levels do not produce a biological response, which can lead to high blood glucose levels.
The thousands of biochemical processes that run all of the various cellular processes that produce energy. Since energy generation is so fundamental to all other processes, in some cases the word metabolism may refer more broadly to the sum of all chemical reactions in the cell.
The collection of genomes of the microorganisms in a given niche. The human microbiome plays key roles in development, immunity, and nutrition. Microbiome dysfunction is associated with the pathology of several conditions, including obesity, depression, and autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia.
Restricting the timing of food intake to certain hours of the day (typically within an 8- to 12-hour time window that begins with the first food or non-water drink) without an overt attempt to reduce caloric intake. TRE is a type of intermittent fasting. It may trigger some beneficial health effects, such as reduced fat mass, increased lean muscle mass, reduced inflammation, improved heart function with age, increased mitochondrial volume, ketone body production, improved repair processes, and aerobic endurance improvements. Some of these effects still need to be replicated in human trials.
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