Fatty Diet Puts Body Clock Out of Whack
November 8th, 2007 Posted by: Dr. Cox
(Ivanhoe Newswire) â What you eat, and most especially, when you eat it, could be altering your normal body clock and putting you at higher risk for Men’s health problems like obesity and diabetes.
This finding comes from Illinois researchers who have been studying the relationship between sleep/wake cycles and metabolism. The new study was conducted in mice who were fed a regular diet for two weeks, then divided into two groups, with one continuing on the regular diet and the other switching to a high fat diet. After two weeks on the high fat diet, the mice in that group showed troubling changes in their normal sleep/wake cycle. Specifically, they began eating when they should have been sleeping.
âOur study was simple — to determine if food itself can alter the clock,â study author Joe Bass, M.D., from Northwestern University, was quoted as saying. âThe answer is yes, alterations in feeding affect timing. We found that as an animal on a high-fat diet gains weight it eats at the inappropriate time for its sleep/wake cycle — all of the excess calories are consumed when the animal should be resting.â
Dr. Bass says the equivalent for humans would be âlike raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night and binging on junk food.â
Understanding what happens to metabolism when diet changes could help scientists better treat diet-related conditions. âOur findings have implications for human disease,â continues Dr. Bass. âThese basic advances in science can be applied to the studies of common disorders like obesity and diabetes.â
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SOURCE: Cell Metabolism, published online Nov. 7, 2007