#200 Optimal Meal Timing and Circadian Rhythms - Siim Land at the Biohacker Summit 2019

Siim Land (0:00)

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And you know, given that the topic or the theme of this conference is optimizing your entire day, then I wanted to give a presentation about how do you find this optimal rhythm for eating and fasting, et cetera, because the topic of circadian rhythms and chronobiology is becoming pretty popular and we now know that it's not only what you eat that matters, but when you do it as well, which is quite critical. So that's gonna be the purpose of my speech, is to gonna give you this unified theory of optimal meal timing and fasting based on the research that we currently have.

And Mahatma Gandhi got it right in some sense as well. So he has a quote, each night when I go to sleep, I die, and the next morning when I wake up, I am reborn. So this is a pretty good quote for describing these circadian rhythms and the day and night cycles of our environment because it reflects not only in our inner physiology, but also the light and darkness as cues that happen on a daily basis. There's morning, there's night, there's life, there's death, and all these things that are happening inside your cells, within your cells, inside every other organ, or in between these processes. So it's a really fascinating topic, and all these things are interlinked with each other. And research has actually shown that, yeah, misalignment of these rhythms between your own body and your own biology between the one of the environment plays a pretty critical role in health, longevity, and any other physiological process. And misalignment is linked to many diseases and accelerated aging.

And actually, in 2017, the circadian rhythms were awarded, or the discoveries about the circadian rhythms were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by these three men. And they identified the specific protein in fruit flies that regulates the circadian clocks of these animals. And now, by now, we know that inside, in humans, within all cells and within all organs are also individual circadian clocks that are connected with a master clock inside your brain. So there's the most important main regulator inside your brain's hippocampus. But there are also many other clocks inside your vital tissues and the cells. So they're all kind of connected, communicating with each other.

And research has actually shown, yeah, that misalignment from these circadian rhythms and disruptions is linked to shortened lifespan in mammalian cells and other life organisms.

And the problem is that as you get older, you inevitably will experience some mild disruption in your own circadian rhythms. And for example, younger people, they tend to exhibit a much more robust and much more resilient circadian pattern throughout the entire day. And they tend to be more, you know, they tend to be healthier as a result of that as well. Whereas on the other hand, as you get older, these variations or these patterns, they become less robust and they become more stagnant. And older people tend to be more vulnerable to this circadian disruption, so to say. Their bodies are becoming less able to detect the cues that are coming from the environment. And this is just another sign of accelerated aging. And the kind of caveat to this is, or the challenge is, how do you maintain proper circadian rhythm throughout your entire lifetime? Not only in your daily activities, but also like the meal timing and the food intake, so to say.

Fortunately, there are a few ways of slowing down this process, as well as preventing the disruption from taking place. So for example, it's been shown that calorie restriction can reverse this negative side effect of aging, which is the disruption in circadian rhythms. And this particular study found that calorie restriction or dietary restriction, eating less calories, eating less food, it's able to reverse this aging process that is caused by circadian disruption. And this happens because calorie restriction is like a stressor on your body. It causes damage in some aspects and it's harmful in small amounts. But it's a positive stressor, it's like a hormetic stressor that actually will yield benefits in the future. Your body adapts to it and as a result, it's able to become more resilient and more robust against the circadian disruption. And it also is mediated through the functioning of NAD metabolism. So NAD is one of the main enzymes that your body produces. And NAD produces energy as well. It's required for essentially all physiological processes. And low NAD levels tend to be correlated with aging and if your body doesn't have enough energy, then nothing is going to work. And the idea of being able to still produce NAD thanks to calorie restriction, that's kind of one of the main mechanisms by which calorie restriction can reverse aging.