• Question: How has learning about the importance of meal timings and sleeping patterns affected the way that you time your meals and sleep?

    Asked by anon-252820 to Nina on 4 May 2020.
    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 4 May 2020:

      Fab question Kyan M and thanks for the interest! The best evidence we have at the moment is that the duration of the overnight fast is quite important for maintaining our body clocks. The natural bed time and wake time of an individual will depend on how their own body clock (circadian rhythm) aligns with the external timing cue (light/dark cycle). This is mainly determined by genetics, and the variation between individuals explains why there are different ‘chronotypes’ i.e. ‘morning larks’ and ‘night owls’. There are still many unanswered questions about this topic, but for now, the best advice I can give is to not eat after your normal tea time until you wake up in the morning. ‘Normal tea time’ will obviously be different between individuals, but eating way past your normal tea time (and especially eating late at night when you would normally be trying to sleep) is going to disrupt your body clock and make it difficult for you to fall asleep. This is because the extra energy you are adding to your body leads to the release of insulin which is a potent timing cue to your cells – they expect to get that cue at the start of the active phase (in the morning for diurnal species like us); they don’t expect to get it at the start of the rest phase. Nowadays I try not to eat too late at night! Here is a paper from our lab which addresses the effect of mistimed feeding on cellular and body clocks – perhaps just read the highlights and summary and take a look at the graphical abstract:
      https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30166-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867419301667%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Comments

  • Photo: Gabriela

    Gabriela commented on :

    It has affected when I eat for sure. For example some of the latest studies indicate that we probably are eating too much, but more importantly not fasting enough because we are eating at all times of day and exhibit more grazing behaviour. Biochemically the period of fasting appears to be important for the system in the overall regulation of energy balance. Some recent studies have indicated that limiting our period of food consumption to a ten hour window in the day appears to bring benefits in the regulation of energy balance. In these studies the subjects were allowed to eat whatever they wanted and as much as they wanted as long as they keep it within the eight to ten hour window, and that still brought some good outcomes. There is still much to do to find out how restricting feeding to a short period brings these outcomes and what happens if we adopt this as a long term habit. However, what these data tells me is that timing of when we eat may be important.