Circadian Rhythm
What if I told you that eating a piece of chocolate mud cake after lunch time will be a lot less detrimental to your health than eating it after dinner?
What if we could manipulate our eating pattern with occasional naughty and tasty fried chicken and still feel healthy?
Do you think I am talking rubbish? Well, absolutely not!
Today, I would like to share with you the secrets of the Circadian rhythm and how the circadian clock interacts with our physical and mental health.
Once you understand the connection between the circadian rhythm and our wellbeing, you will be able to implement this into your lifestyle. I am confident that you will achieve health improvements, such as maintaining healthy weight, and increasing your energy.
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioural changes that follows a daily cycle. They respond primarily to light and darkness in living environment. Sleeping at night and being awake during the day is an example of a light-related circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms are found in most living things, including animals, plants, and even tiny microbes.
Let’s think our eyes work like a camera. The light-sensing protein in ganglion cells in eyes recognise blue-light from the Sun and sends signals as a daylight to our brain hypothalamus. Conversely, this intelligent protein cells recognise orange-light as a night time. Good examples of orange lights are moon, candle lights, and salt lamps.
This amazing human physiology leads us to some questions; how about artificial blue-light exposures from TVs, computers, even smart phones? What message does the brains receive from the eyes?
The answer is quite simple. Our eyes to recognise those unnatural blue-light as daylight, and send messages to our brains as “it is day time, not bed time yet” As you can imagine, this will confuse our brain.
A study suggests that longer you are exposed to artificial blue-light at night, more delay of production of melatonin which is an important hormone to promote sleep. Coincidently I’ve seen many cases of sleeping issues at the naturopathic clinic, and those clients are often exposed to artificial blue-light at night time.
Following a good circadian rhythm is not only about daylight and darkness. Some eating habits can disrupt circadian rhythms, and potentially it can lead to some metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
Scientists took pairs of genetically identical mice born to the same parents and raised in the same home for over the 12 weeks of study. They gave one group access to a high-fat diet whenever wanted. The other group had the same amount of food, but they had to eat all their food within an 8-hour window. The mice with the smaller food window quickly learned to eat the same numbers of calories as the mice that had access to food all the time. The result was quite astonishing!
Despite the content of diet was unhealthy, mice ate within 8-hour window were completely protected from the disease which is normally seen from a poor diet. The time-restricted eating mice didn't gain any excess weight, and they had normal blood sugar and normal cholesterol levels.
Researchers ran the same experiment with 9, 10, and 12 hours window and similar benefits overall.
Time restricted eating can collaborate with circadian rhythm to provide our organ to function better. For instance, if you start your breakfast at 800AM and finish your dinner by 800PM, that will give you 12hours fasting until next day. This is great for digestive system to rest, assists in maintaining healthy blood sugar level, and protect us from cardiovascular disease. Most our cells are repairing and rejuvenating at night, therefore, having a good quality of sleep is crucial to function better next day.
If you are struggling to change your diet completely, I would highly recommend you to try 12hours time restricted eating, and being outside during the day, and monitor your artificial blue light uses at night. This will be a good first step to improve your health.
Remember, eating rich chocolate mud cake during day is way better than eating after dinner!
Thank you for visiting my blog.