#130 Circadian Rhythms and Time Restricted Eating with Andy Mant

Andy Mant (0:00)

You know, when we look at it from a circadian standpoint, studies are now pointing to the fact that you can get leptin or insulin resistance independent of the type of food you eat, just in the absence of, you know, a fully synchronized circadian rhythm. And this is how powerful this stuff is. Everyone has this, everyone seems to have a disrupted circadian rhythm because of the environment we live in. And there's only a few of us that understand that food is obviously very important. Don't get me wrong, but can't ignore the fact that our circadian rhythm is very much entrained to the onset of some of these diseases and resistances that then causes us to overeat and become sick.

Siim Land (0:36)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Andy Mant (0:46)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:49)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Andy Mant from Australia. Andy is an entrepreneur and the founder of BluBlox.

Which is a blue blocking glasses company. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Mant (1:03)

Thanks for having me on again, Siim. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

Siim Land (1:06)

Yeah, it's good to see you. And the last time we talked on the podcast was maybe like a year ago or something.

But what have you been up to since that time?

Andy Mant (1:15)

Yeah, so it's, I think it was maybe September, October time last year when we last spoke. So almost a year now, which is way, way too long. Obviously, we've been speaking on and off, off camera, which is always great. And been following your adventures across the various summits that you've been involved in. So that's been awesome. I guess from my point of view, we've been delving deeper into the research. And we've been coming up with more lines on our products as well. We've been posting a lot in our Light and Health group about all this new literature that's coming out on how circadian clocks are entrained through different sort of external cues as opposed to light.

So I thought it was a good time to reach out to you again and talk a little bit about these new studies and what else we've learned really in that last sort of 10-month period.

Siim Land (2:08)

Yeah, for sure. And good to talk with you. But if anyone wants to listen to the previous talk that goes into more detail about how blue light affects your physiology and how it affects your sleep, especially, then I'll leave the link to that show in the description.

But maybe just for the new listeners, can you give a brief overview about blue light and how it affects your health and sleep, especially?

Andy Mant (2:34)

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's always good to start off with the basics. So as mammals and every single mammal on earth has something called a circadian rhythm, okay. So what that means is that our bodies and every cell in our body is basically in sync or should be in sync with the rotation of the earth and the spin of the earth.

Now how our bodies get that information primarily from the, I guess, the orbit of our planet is that it basically takes cues from light and dark signals. So the way you entrain your circadian rhythm is your body will release a hormone called cortisol when it's time to get up.

You'll go and watch the sunrise or be outside, I guess, from an ancestral point of view.

And that light will tell your brain it's daytime and it will send messages to other cells in the body to say, right, it's daytime. We need to produce the hormones to be active and alert during the day. Now when it comes to the nighttime when the sun sets and we watch that, the cues of darkness and maybe the reds and oranges of sort of ancestral campfires told us that it's now time to relax, not to produce cortisol and to allow serotonin, tryptophan to basically be turned into something called melatonin, which makes us feel sleepy, wants to go to sleep and have a really good night's sleep. Now that's all very well in an ancestral world, but the issue that we face today is that we're exposed more than ever to artificial light. So what that's telling our brain after dark is that it's still daytime, it's still midday, it's still early morning, and it's saying keep cortisol levels high and you don't need to produce melatonin. So we're struggling to sleep, struggling to get off to sleep, maybe not having the best quality deep restorative sleep and REM sleep, which helps with that clear out of dead cells and making us feel fresh and alert the next day.