#137 The Best Time to Eat and Sleep with Greg Potter PhD

Greg Potter (0:00)

Chrono-nutrition is basically the idea that it's not only what you eat that matters, but when you eat too, and specifically when you eat, relative to the timing of your biological clocks.

So, for example, I suspect that people who have digestive issues stand to benefit a lot from time-restricted eating, whether that's relatively early in the day or late in the day, and giving that type of consistent time queue to the different clocks in your circadian system likely is a good thing. And many of these studies, of course, are short-term interventions, but we don't really know that for sure.

SPEAKER_2 (0:33)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:36)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:38)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Greg Potter (0:44)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (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 Greg Potter. Greg has a PhD in Circadian Rhythms and Chronobiology. His research focuses on how light dark cycles affect sleep and attrition.

Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Potter (1:04)

Hey Siim, good to be here.

Siim Land (1:06)

Yeah, how's it going? Like we just saw in the Biohacker conference in Latvia a few months ago. So what's been up since that time?

Greg Potter (1:14)

A few bits and pieces. Yeah, I've been keeping myself busy, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing you in London shortly for the Health Optimization Summit.

Siim Land (1:23)

Yeah, that's gonna be a pretty damn awesome event. And if I'm not mistaken, the Biohacker Summit as well.

Greg Potter (1:29)

Yeah, in Helsinki in November, where I haven't been before. So I'm pumped to go out there too.

Siim Land (1:35)

Well, I would suggest that it's not much difference from the original or the standard UK weather. So November in Helsinki is pretty damn grim and a lot of clouds, but the people and the conference itself is gonna be worth it.

Greg Potter (1:53)

Yeah, those guys are always put on such great shows. So it'll be great regardless.

Siim Land (1:57)

Yeah, that's good. But talking about you then, why did you choose to get a degree in Chronobiology?

Greg Potter (2:07)

I chose really because I'm broadly interested in how lifestyle affects health and my appreciation for sleep and circadian rhythm specifically grew over time. So when I first became interested in this stuff, I mostly focused on diet and exercise, as I think many people do.

And I did an undergraduate and a master's degree in exercise science, specializing in exercise physiology. And during that time, I was mostly working with athletes too in my free time. I was doing some personal training, some sports, maths, arts therapy, some coaching.

And during my master's degree, I was looking around at PhD options and realized that sleep and circadian rhythms are very important, but I didn't know nearly as much about those as I did about exercise and diet. And so I wanted to add that string to my bow. And I saw an opportunity at the University of Leeds to study the interactions between sleep, diet, and metabolic health and applied for that. And the rest is history, as they say. So I finished that about halfway through last year. And now I'm working for a digital health startup and also I'm still involved in a little bit of research on the side and do some public speaking now and then too.

Siim Land (3:26)

Yeah, it's so true in a sense that the light cycles, they become more and more prominent in even like nutritional sciences, because people realize that it's not just what you eat, but it's also like when you do it that matters and how it affects your entire health.

So the kind of field of circadian rhythms and coronal biology is still very young and not a lot of research has been done in it. But maybe like give you a brief overview of like, what are circadian rhythms and how do they affect our health?

Greg Potter (3:57)

Yeah, so circadian rhythms are self-generated, roughly 24-hour changes in various different biological processes. And we have these rhythms in order to anticipate and adapt to changes in our environments. So if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, then as organisms, we evolved in the presence of these predictable roughly 24-hour changes and things like light and dark and temperature, and also risk of predation and food availability. So in this way, it would have been adaptive for us to have these internal timekeeping mechanisms to help us be active, to acquire food when we were likely to get food, and then to also stay out of the line of sight of any predators too.