Metabolism

Timing of Food Intake is Crucial for Weight Loss

With over half of Americans considered overweight, many people engage in the battle of the bulge on a daily basis. There are so many factors involved in weight loss beyond “calories in, minus calories out” that people can continue to gain even while making difficult lifestyle changes. Several studies have examined non-dietary factors that contribute to weight loss and found that surprisingly, the timing of food intake is an important piece of the puzzle.

Chronobiology and Metabolism

Chronobiology is a scientific field that studies how our body’s natural cycles are affected by solar and lunar rhythms. One of the most important cycles of chronobiology is the 24-hour circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm is an important part of your metabolism, controlling a wide variety of cellular processes. Your circadian rhythm can also affect your weight in a variety of ways. For example, people who work nights are more likely to be overweight or obese. Genes involved in the circadian rhythm also appear to be involved in the production of hormones associated with hunger and satiety, such as leptin and ghrelin.

Although these relationships have been known for years, the extent to which the timing of food intake could affect weight gain and weight loss is new information.

The Timing of Food Intake and Weight Loss

Our mitochondria are an integral part of metabolism, converting sugars and other sources of fuel into the type of energy that our cells use, ATP. The rate at which mitochondria perform this energy conversion appears to depend on the time of day. Peak energy burning occurs about four hours into our waking day. People who eat more of their calories early in the day, such as having a large breakfast and lunch followed by a light dinner, lose weight faster than those who eat more of their calories later in the day. While this is bad news for nighttime snackers, it offers one way for people to increase their weight loss while still enjoying the foods they love.

Losing Weight By Working With Your Circadian Rhythm

Cutting calories and getting plenty of exercise are still important lifestyle changes for people who wish to lose weight. However, changing when you eat can have a huge effect as well. Because mitochondria are working at maximum capacity four hours after you wake, this is the optimal time to take in calorie-heavy foods. In the evening, when your mitochondria are using less energy, eating lighter foods with less fat and sugar is a better answer.

Other Reasons to Eat Less at Night

There are other reasons that eating less at night can be a positive health habit. Acid reflux and other digestive issues are often worse at night if people eat heavy meals. Sticking to light foods in the hours before bed improves these conditions. In addition, our livers and other detoxifying systems do much of their work at night. The process of digesting food can interfere with this and other important aspects of metabolism that occur mainly at night. For this reason, many doctors and researchers recommend that people eat at least four hours before going to bed. This allows meals to be digested and metabolized before you fall asleep.

New research in chronobiology is offering insight into a variety of health issues. This increases understanding of the way our bodies work while presenting new ways that we can improve our health. With metabolic issues now one of the top public health concerns in the western world, research into the timing of food intake may improve and enrich lives.

How Sleep Restriction Can Sabotage Your Health

Mar 30 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

How do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? If you are like most people, you feel fatigued, achy, out of sorts and a bit duller than usual. As much as sleep restriction obviously affects your health and mood, it can have even more severe effects on your hormone levels, cell metabolism and other less visible aspects of health.

Sleep Restriction and Your Metabolism

A recent study has found that sleep restriction can effectively ruin your metabolism. Participants who slept 5.5 hours or less every night experienced a variety of ill effects. Their glucose metabolism was severely impaired, which could lead to type 2 diabetes over time. These people also made less leptin, the hormone associated with feeling full and satisfied, which led to increased hunger. Last, there was an effect on testosterone levels, with the sleep-deprived subjects showing lower amounts of this important male hormone. Surprisingly, the research subjects for this study were young healthy men, perhaps the healthiest population. If sleep restriction can affect these men so drastically, it may have even greater effects on older or less healthy bodies.

This is not the only study to identify sleep habits as a key regulator of metabolism and health. Other studies have found that sleep truly is essential to good health and especially to maintaining a healthy weight. Sleep restriction can cause you to lose fat-free body mass like muscle while packing on fat. Because of these findings, getting the right amount of sleep should be part of every weight loss plan.

Is Our Obesity Epidemic Caused by a Sleep Restriction Epidemic?

Another study published in the journal Obesity suggests that sleep deprivation may be one of the most important factors in weight gain and obesity. When forced to sleep only four hours a day, half the recommended amount, volunteers had a sharp increase in both hunger and ghrelin levels.

Ghrelin is a hormone that produces that gnawing, ravenous hunger feeling that most of us have experienced. This hormone is normally released only when we haven’t eaten for a long interval, but it is expressed continuously in people who are undergoing sleep restriction. It takes an enormous amount of self-control, more than most people have, to resist eating under the influence of ghrelin.

How Much Sleep Is Not Enough?

Sleep restriction has been established as an independent risk factor for obesity, which means it can cause obesity even in the absence of other variables such as genetic predisposition or sedentary lifestyle. However, how much sleep is enough? Many people in the Western world simply do not get enough sleep, which has changed our perception of how much we need. Seven to eight hours is the optimal amount for most people, and as much as five and a half hours can cause negative biological effects. Millions of Americans do not get the sleep that they need to maintain optimal health. Many doctors are recommending better sleep habits as a way to combat obesity and other common diseases.

Our culture almost has reverence for people who go without the sleep they need. Whether it is a medical student studying into the early hours of the morning, a businessman working 20 hour days, or a mother up at 2 a.m. caring for a baby, we treat the sacrifice of sleep as though it is a sign of a person’s willpower. However, these studies suggest that we should treat sleep restriction instead like the dangerous and unhealthy behavior it is. In order to maintain good health, modern people need to make sleep more of a priority and allow others to get that sleep as well.

Good Bacteria and Digestive Health Determine Disease Risk

Mar 24 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

Inside your intestines live billions of bacteria and other microorganisms. These are not parasites, but rather an important part of your body and your health. New research has found that these microorganisms are integral in disease prevention, emotional health and other areas. However, we live in a world filled with antibiotics and antimicrobials that may be affecting the important functions of our digestive system’s “good” bacteria.

Are All Bacteria Bad?

While we usually associate bacteria with infections and illness, not all bacteria are bad for our health. Our digestive tract is filled with a variety of bacteria that play many roles in maintaining health. For example, there are certain vitamins that we can only absorb after they have been broken down by bacteria. In addition, maintaining ideal levels of beneficial flora in our digestive tract keeps our immune system healthy and protects us from deadly infections.

Researchers are beginning to discover more about the microorganisms that inhabit our digestive tract, which are known collectively as our microbiome. Every person has a slightly different microbiome, although there are several organisms such as Bacteroides that are common to most people. Not only does our microbiome include thousands of species of bacteria, viruses and archaeans, but these organisms are incredibly diverse even within their own species. We are only just beginning to discover the integral role that our microbiome plays in our health.

Good Bacteria and Your Health

New research suggests that the benefits of gut bacteria extend far beyond the digestive tract. The bacteria in our intestines play an important role in regulating both our brains and our immune system. Proteins made by these microscopic organisms have a variety of beneficial effects on our bodies, including releasing proteins that have been found to prevent cancer and other serious diseases. There are new studies almost every week proclaiming a new and previously unknown function of our microbiome.

What Happens When You Lose Your Microbiome?

Most people in the modern world have taken antibiotics. Although antibiotics can save lives, they also compromise our microbiome, killing off good bacteria along with the dangerous bacterial invaders. Some researchers believe that this lack of healthy good bacteria in much of the population may be one cause for the recent increase in metabolic syndrome, obesity, and certain types of cancer. In addition, the presence of good bacteria in our intestines crowds out bad bacteria and makes it hard for them to cause a true infection. Certain pathogenic bacteria, such as c. difficile, have caused deadly infections after people took broad spectrum antibiotics that killed other beneficial organisms in their microbiome that were helping to keep the pathogens at bay.

Maintaining a Healthy Microbiome

Maintaining a healthy range of good bacteria in your gut is essential to good health in a variety of ways. However, our world is so filled with antibacterial products that this can be a challenge. One way to encourage a healthy microbiome is to take a supplement that includes both prebiotics and probiotics. Probiotics are the good bacteria that provide key health benefits, while prebiotics contain the fiber and other compounds that these good bacteria need to live and thrive. Taking a combination of prebiotics and probiotics can encourage your microbiome to flourish with a variety of bacteria that support good health.

Our modern world is very different from the one that we evolved in, creating health challenges that we have never known. While we no longer live in fear of dying from infectious disease, we now face an entirely new set of diseases to fear. Taking a supplement that includes both prebiotics and probiotics is one way to keep your body healthy and strong.

Circadian Clock in the Liver Found to Regulate Hunger and Metabolism

Mar 23 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

When we talk about the circadian rhythm, most people think about the brain. However, every organ has its own internal biological clock. The liver’s innate 24-hour rhythm is especially important to your metabolism and even affects the central circadian clock in your brain. New studies suggest that the liver’s circadian clock may even regulate hunger, digestion and a variety of human behaviors.

Your Liver: A Key Part of Metabolism

The liver is the largest organ in the human body and also one of the most multifunctional ones. It plays a variety of important roles necessary for daily life. The liver is technically considered a gland due to its active secretion of a variety of important hormones that regulate metabolism. In addition, the liver detoxifies the blood, regulates glucose balance, breaks down red blood cells and produces a variety of proteins and vitamins. When the liver can no longer function properly, a person will quickly die unless they can get a transplant.

Many of the activities of the liver occur constantly or in response to environmental cues. However, some of these functions, especially metabolic activities, occur on a distinct cycle determined by a circadian clock in the liver itself. This internal clock appears to be in constant communication with pacemakers in our brains, potentially affecting a wide range of functions and behaviors.

The Role of the Circadian Clock in the Liver

When you travel more than a time zone away, you may suffer from jet lag and disrupted sleep. Many travelers notice that they are hungry at odd times as well. It may surprise you to learn that this is due to the presence of a circadian clock in the liver. This clock regulates, among other things, the times when you are hungry. The liver releases hormones that make us hungry along with important enzymes for digestion just before the times when we normally eat.

The presence of a circadian clock governing hunger and digestion was confirmed in a recent study of rats. Rats express certain genes related to circadian rhythm periodically, and this gene activity correlates with hunger and release of digestive enzymes. When fed only at certain times, the expression of these genes slowly changed to mimic the new feeding schedule. This is similar to the behavior of circadian rhythm genes that govern the sleep-wake cycle; people can gradually change their bedtimes or wake up times. Furthermore, this study found that there is a great deal of communication between the circadian clocks of the brain and those of the liver, presenting a possible mechanism for the Zeitgeber effect of food.

Liver, Brain, and Circadian Rhythm

It is exciting to find confirmation of previous studies concluding that the timing of food intake can affect the body’s circadian rhythm. In addition, these new findings are promising when it comes to finding new treatment possibilities for people who struggle with obesity, diabetes and other diseases that are affected by both liver function and the circadian rhythm. More effective treatment can result when people take their medications at the time of day when they will be most effective, or at times when the cell receptors that these medications target are most active. In addition, while there still needs to be more study in this area, the current body of evidence suggests that eating late at night may be detrimental to people who have sleep disorders.

Discovering the biochemical foundation of the circadian clock in the liver opens new avenues for study. Every organ appears to have its own internal clock, but that of the liver seems especially important in regulating metabolism and overall well-being. Understanding how our bodies work is always a first step to finding new and more effective medical treatments.

Can Your Circadian Rhythm Determine the Best Time to Work Out?

Feb 10 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

Just being committed to a work out regime is satisfying. However, many still question whether circadian rhythms can influence results when deciding the best time to work out.

Whether working out to increase strength and endurance, or to improve our overall quality of health, many of us want to get the most out of our efforts and question when the best time to work out might be. This topic has been heavily researched with controversial results. The truth is, the answer varies depending on the specific question asked, your training goals and work out adherence.

Your Circadian Rhythm

All of the processes that occur within our body are regulated by precise cycles, also known as our internal clocks. Processes such as our heart rate, hormone secretion, body temperature, sleep cycle and energy levels all fluctuate in specific 24-hour rhythms.

All of these various internal clocks are based on signals from our environment. The internal clock that controls the circadian rhythm allows for this rhythmic cycle to be set and reset based on external stimuli such as light and darkness, food intake etc. These clocks send signals to all of our cells, which directs them on how and when to conduct certain physiological processes within our bodies.

Core Body Temperature and Power Output

Believing that the best time to work out may be affected by our body temperatures, researchers conducted a study that determined our core body temperature is lower in the morning and higher in the evening. The performance of study participants while working out was studied both in the morning and evening. Some would expect to see signs of fatigue in the participants during the evening work out, but the results were the opposite. The performance of all study participants was actually higher in the evening hours. Based on this study, it is also believed that strength output can be improved by up to five percent during these hours.

Hormones and an Anabolic State

The fluctuation of testosterone and cortisol levels within our body are one of the most important factors influenced by our circadian rhythm, giving us an indication as to when our body is in an anabolic state (building up muscle). It has been reported that testosterone production is low during the day and higher at night. The secretion of cortisol, which is a stress hormone that can put the body in a catabolic state (breaking muscle down), rises rapidly upon waking and decreases throughout the day, with levels low at night.

Using this information produces a ratio of testosterone to cortisol that indicates which state our body is in. With this ratio being highest in the afternoon and evening, it can be assumed that the body is in a state that is conducive to building muscle, therefore, this may be the best time to work out. However, more research is needed to determine if, and just how, this hormonal fluctuation is related to muscle growth.

The Best Time to Work Out

From the information gathered about the circadian rhythm of our core body temperatures and hormonal fluctuations, the best time to work out seems to be between 2:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. This time frame is considered valid only for those that are awake when its light and sleep when its dark outside.

Some of the most recent research findings suggest you may also want to consider the following factors when working out:

Late afternoon is the optimal time for exercise as our core body temperatures are highest.
It is reported that power output is five percent higher near mid-day and anaerobic exercise, such as running, improves by five percent during the late afternoon hours.
Our endurance to exercise is reportedly four percent higher in the afternoon.
We are less likely to suffer injuries in the afternoon, as our core body temperature is higher and our muscles are soft, flexible, and at the greatest strength.
Although it may appear that afternoon exercise is the most optimal, research has shown that those who exercise in the morning are more likely to stick to their exercise regime than those that work out in the later hours.

Currently, there is no particular study that offers conclusive evidence that working out in the afternoon or early evening is best. What we have learned from these studies is that we may be afforded certain advantages during specific times of the day depending upon our goals, type of exercise and schedule.

Those of you who work out in the morning shouldn’t be discouraged. If morning hours are best for you, then stick to your current regimen. One of the external stimuli that the circadian rhythm responds to is exercise. It has been found that regular, scheduled exercise has the ability to reset the rhythmic cycles by causing a significant shift in the gene expression of the internal clocks. This alters the molecular processes within peripheral tissues, including muscles. Therefore, your circadian rhythm will learn to adapt accordingly to your regular morning work outs.