Author: Erin Elizabeth

Recent research has highlighted fundamental changes in our knowledge about the workings of the circadian clock and how it orchestrates our sleep-wake cycles when we eat and even the times our bodies metabolize nutrients. Getting a good night’s sleep often comes down to two things–stress and diet. There is a powerful link between circadian rhythms and metabolism and it is quickly becoming a new avenue for understanding disorders of both systems, including jet lag, sleep disorders, obesity, and diabetes. The timing of our meals affects our ability to lose weight so the integration of sleep rhythm data would help to build more effective personalized diet guides, experts have said. RELATED STORY: NBC: Woman says she lost over 120 pounds on the ‘Keto’ Diet During a conference on chrono-nutrition, circadian clocks and mealtimes at the Royal Society of Medicine, in London, earlier this month, Dr. Jonathan Johnston, reader in chronobiology and integrative physiology at the University of Surrey, explained that our response to food depends on what time we eat that food. As such, he said that chrononutrition – the practice of matching your food timings to your internal body clock aka circadian system – is an emerging and high-profile research area. He explained that humans have many circadian clocks within their bodies and most of the main organs in the digestive system have their own clock. If our organs’...