Out of Sync | The Scientist Magazine®

" it’s not just disrupted sleep that can lead to these myriad physiological symptoms; it’s also the altered patterns of food consumption that go along with keeping such strange hours."

"But humans, particularly those in developed countries with abundant artificial light, late-night TV, and 24-hour diners, have been putting themselves through an inadvertent experiment over the last few decades. No longer does daylight dictate the times when we eat. “That is the cycle that has gone wrong in the last 50 years,” says Panda.

With caution and caveats, one could speculate that this is, in part, why obesity and metabolic disorders have escalated to epidemic levels, particularly when mistimed eating is coupled with a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. It stands to reason that our metabolic functions, as controlled by the circadian clock, evolved to cycle in harmony with the Earth’s daily rhythms, to optimize processes such as energy use and storage. In doing so, we became adapted to eat during the daytime, and maladapted for eating at night. Opposing these rhythms, as many of us now do, may challenge our bodies’ normal cycles and set us up for disease. “Like many evolutionary arguments, it’s hard to prove,” says Lazar. “But otherwise it’s hard to imagine why else we would need things so tightly linked to the Earth’s rotation.”

Out of Sync | The Scientist Magazine®