#381 Best Intermittent Fasting Window, Best Time to Take Supplements, and More - Greg Potter PhD

Greg Potter (0:00)

And what Timer Shifted Eating is doing is, it's helping to organize their clockwork. Now that it's better organized, it's also aligning delivery of nutrients with when those clocks will better respond to those nutrients.

Siim Land (0:12)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Greg Potter. Greg has a PhD in the Leeds University of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine. This is the second part to our discussion about chronobiology. In our first episode, we talked about sleep and fixing sleep problems. In this episode, we're going to focus on chrononutrition and time-restricted eating. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, formerly known as Blue Blocks.

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Greg, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Siim.

Greg Potter (1:29)

Always a pleasure to speak.

Siim Land (1:30)

Yes, we decided to do a follow up to our previous conversation because we only managed to cover sleep and fixing chronic sleep problems and stuff like that. So we never really got into chrono-nutrition and chronopharmacology, which is one new concept that you introduced me to as well in the previous talk. So yeah, I'm just glad to continue on with our discussion.

Greg Potter (1:56)

Fantastic.

Siim Land (1:57)

Yeah, looking forward to it. So we'll obviously want to lay some sort of a framework.

So what is chrono-nutrition, and how does it relate to the circadian rhythms and sleep, or maybe just overall health?

Greg Potter (2:14)

I would think about chrono-nutrition as using an understanding of your body's circadian biology to improve how you respond to the foods and drinks that you consume. And as is often the case in the world of circadian biology and biological rhythms in general, there's a two-way relationship between these two variables. And what I mean by that is that what and when you eat can affect your body's clocks and therefore your biological rhythms, but also your body's clocks and biological rhythms affect how you respond to those foods and drinks. And so what we're trying to do is improve variables such as our cardiometabolic health by better understanding when we should eat certain foods, when we should drink certain items.

And I think this is a really important subject, because if you look at how most people eat, they spread out their food intake over quite a long period each day. There's not that much research on this, but if you look in countries such as the USA, then it's common for people to spread out their intake of calorie containing items over more than 14 hours per day on average.

And that might contribute to deterioration in the function of their body's clocks over time, and in turn deterioration in their general health and well-being. And based on recent science, we know that if people can change when they consume certain items, they can improve many aspects of their biology. And the good news is that most people can actually make these changes, because one of the issues in the world of nutrition science is that often people fundamentally understand what they need to be doing. They need to eat more fruits and vegetables, they need to drink more water, but they struggle to make those changes. And when it comes to managing certain chronic health conditions, they take the example of type 2 diabetes.

In a situation in which somebody goes to visit their medical doctor, and they've got 15 minutes with her, and the medical doctor is trying to convey information about how to change what they eat to improve their blood sugar control, saying, oh, you should reduce your carbohydrate intake, and maybe you should favor lower glycemic load foods. A lot of people won't understand the actual advice. In the case of chronic nutrition interventions, though, people understand what they should be doing. If you just say to somebody, I want you to only eat and drink within a regular period of eight to 10 hours each day, and you can choose when that window is. So if it was eight hours, then it could be between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. People understand it, and people seem to be able to stick to it relatively consistently. The numbers vary, but people can probably stick to it something like 60% of the time going by the most recent data. And importantly, people don't seem to need to stick to the guidance all of the time to realize some benefits.