Circadian rhythms are often referred to as our natural “body clocks”, and to an extent this is true. We all become tired, and this is usually at a similar time each day, similarly we often wake up in the morning from our sleep at a standard time if given the chance (i.e. without our pesky alarm clocks getting involved). This natural, however we often ignore this drive to sleep because we are watching TV, playing a video game or surfing the net on our smart phones or tablets. The effect this has on us is not entirely well understood, and there is plenty of research going on right now. One interesting study looked at food intake over various time periods. The idea here is that if we are spending more time awake, then there is likely to be longer periods (between waking up and going to bed) that we are able to consume food.
Professor Panda and his colleagues (Amandine Chaix, Amir Zarrinpar and Phuong Miu) at the Salk institute for biological studies use mice models to investigate if consuming food over longer time periods actually impacts on weight gain. These mice were genetically identical, and fed the same type and amount of foods i.e. their calorie intake was the same. What they found was that mice who only consumed food between 8-12 hrs (say between 7am to 7pm) gained less weight than those that were able to eat over a 15hr or more period. They also showed that the type of muscle the mice had is impacted too, with the restricted eating times having more lean muscle. They also found that if they allowed the time restricted mice to “binge” on the weekends, this didn’t seem to significantly impact on their weight gain. So it’s not all doom and gloom for the late night movie snacks, the occasional weekend binge is not going to be the end of the world, just don’t do it every week. The authors do suggest additional research avenues for investigation, but their findings are by themselves are still quite interesting. It seems that not only is sleep restriction from our lifestyles bad for us, the added late night snacking that comes along with it is bad for us too.
