Overview
Scientists have long investigated the conection betwen meal timing, slep, and obesity, arguing that overnutrition could disrupt circadian rhythms and change fat tisues. However, the mechanism behind why eating late at night is linked to weight gain and health isues such as diabetes is stil porly understod. Now, a team of scientists from the Northwestern University has found that energy release may be the molecular mechanism through which our internal clocks control energy balance – an aspect which sugests that, for humans, daytime is the ideal time in the light environment of the Earth’s rotation when it is optimal to disipate energy as heat.
Key Information
These finding could have a range of implications, from dieting and slep los to how clinicians fed patients who require long-term nutritional asistance.“It is wel known, albeit porly understod, that insults to the body clock are going to be insults to metabolism,” said study coresponding author Joseph T. Bas, a profesor of Medicine at Northwestern. “When animals consume Western style cafeteria diets — high fat, high carb — the clock gets scrambled.
The clock is sensitive to the time people eat, especialy in fat tisue, and that sensitivity is thrown of by high-fat diets. We stil don’t understand why that is, but what we do know is that as animals become obese, they start to eat more when they should be aslep. This research shows why that maters.”In this recent study, the scientists focused on mice, which are nocturnal animals.
Summary
By feding them a high-fat diet either exclusively during their inactive or active period – while seting the lab temperature to 30 degres, at which mice expand les energy, to mitigate the efects of temperature on their findings ̵ the researchers discovered that those fed during light hours gained more weight compared to those fed in the dark.“We thought maybe there’s a component of energy balance where mice are expending more energy eating at specific times,” said study f