When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver-the body’s metabolic clearinghouse-is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it. ‘If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism, says the study’s leader Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory. The Salk researchers’ findings, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity. ‘We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle, says Panda. In mammals, the circadian timing system is composed of a central circadian clock in […]