I was reading an article in Scientific American on the various internal clocks we have within our bodies. I think most of us are familiar with the circadian rhythm one, the master clock, in our brain that defines our sense of what a day is. It's nominally tied to the daily cycle of the sun but, as we all know, not all of us are exactly morning people. There are several groups of people following different internal days which can be fine if you find sympathetic friends and jobs around your sense of a day, otherwise you'll be tired all the time.
As it turns out, there are other clocks in our bodies located variously in our livers, pancreases, and even fat cells all depending on feedback from the other clocks to tell them what to do. Once again, understanding what these clocks do fell upon the laboratory mouse.
It was found that when one of these secondary clocks was damaged or disabled entirely, that it would have profound effects on the health of the mouse. For instance, when the pancreas's clock was disabled, their little mouse bodies would not secrete insulin. The pancreases in question were perfectly capable of producing and delivering insulin...they just didn't. The clocks within this organ needed to tell the pancreas when to secrete the chemical and this is important so that insulin isn't released when the mouse is sleeping which would drop its blood sugar to dangerously low, even fatal, levels. But since the organ was not able to interpret feedback from other organs about the mouse's internal day, it (I guess) always assumed the mouse was asleep.
As a result, all these mice got diabetes.
The liver's clock determined when the mouse should be producing or using glycogen and without that clock functioning, their livers kept producing the chemical and giving them a condition known as "fatty liver".
The body clocks had other effects too. In another experiment, three groups of mice were used. Two groups were given high-fat diets. Of those two groups, one was fed during the mouse's normal sleep-wake cycles and the other group was fed at an irregular time for mice (they are nocturnal creatures so I'm assuming this meant during the daytime when they'd normally be sleeping). The third group was the control with a regular diet and regular sleep-wake cycle.
The results I thought were interesting. The high-fat diet mice being fed at irregular hours, as one might assume, got fat. However, the other group of mice fed the same diet but at their regular times did not gain weight at all. The tentative conclusion being that WHEN you eat matters as much WHAT you eat.
Timing is important.
Although these results are hardly conclusive, it would seem imperative to figure out what would be considered optimum times for a human to eat and do those times change if you're more of an afternoon person than morning person?
It certainly sounds tempting. A diet that requires little sacrifice in terms of what, only when. I guess, if you're predisposed to trying this out for yourself, that you should figure out which countries tend to have the leanest populations and try to figure out how, and more importantly when, they are eating first.
The controls in this experiment would be the United States and Mexico. Those two countries presently have the highest percentage of overweight/obese people. Japan and Korea have the lowest incidences of obesity among wealthier nations (between 4-5%) as do the Scandinavian countries and Italy for Europe (about 10% each), so take your dieting lessons from them.
The article also mentioned mood being affected by messing with our internal clocks. Specifically it mentioned depression being affected by the alteration of our sleep-wake cycles. It was a serendipitous find as it made me realize with a start that quite a number of my depressions have started on Wednesday...my first day back at work after two days off.
Laughably that could be attributed to me not wanting to go to work or a case of "The Mondays" time-shifted to Wednesday but now I wonder... How much of that is me staying up really late on Monday so I can enjoy a normal Tuesday which in turn means forcing myself right back to a normal schedule via a long nap on Wednesday (I should mention I work overnights here and that being up in the overnight period on a day off, well...sucks).
Am I exacerbating my depression fucking with my sleep-wake cycles like that? I'd hate for that to be true because I'm still going to have to do it, and frequently at that, if I ever expect to see friends or take care of errands. Is the high I experience on Tuesday the equivalent of a junk food high? That is, it feels good to have done so at the time but I'll end up paying for it later?
I wonder...
No comments:
Post a Comment