Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - How Much PROTEIN should you EAT (and when) with Danny Lennon

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

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Welcome in everyone to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matrenga and in today's episode I am discussing all things protein and nutrient timing with Danny Lennon of Sigma Nutrition, my fellow Danny, an Irishman, I must say. We discuss a lot about protein timing for muscle growth, for body fat reduction, and even circadian biology and how eating at certain times can influence things like your sleep and performance. This is a re-airing of an episode that we recorded at the beginning of the pandemic. So please sit back, enjoy, follow Danny's work. Danny, again, is the owner of SigmaNutrition.com, and he is the founder of the Sigma Nutrition Radio podcast, one of my favorite nutrition podcasts. So check that out

after listening to today's episode, and enjoy my chat with Danny Lennon. Hey everyone, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogues podcast. Today, I'm not the only Danny on the show. I'm sitting down with Danny Lennon of Sigma Nutrition Radio and Sigma Nutrition, and we're taking a deep dive looking into nutrient timing in a really exciting new space in the nutrition field called chrononutrition. We're gonna talk all about how to prioritize nutrients around training and across the day

to optimize health and performance, but also how chrononutrition and working with our circadian biology might be a way to optimize health and performance, but also how chrononutrition and working with our circadian biology might be a way to optimize health and longevity, as well as breaking down this exciting and emerging field. So stay tuned to listen in to Danny Matrenga and Danny Lennon talking nutrient timing and chrononutrition. So Danny, how's it going, man? I am doing well. How are you, my friend? I'm in the same boat. Could be better, could be worse. Not taking anything for granted. I have some bumper plates and some weights in the garage, so I feel as though I have it better than most.

Yeah, that's kind of my sentiment that it's easy to find things that are not so good right now, but relative to what a lot of people are facing, I'm personally doing okay. So I'm just kind of trying to be thankful for that. Yeah. And so, dude, I'm actually really excited to have you on to talk about some of the more perhaps detailed nuances of nutrition, particularly timing and how it can affect other things in our biology. And you're actually one of the first people in the nutrition podcast space. And I think of all of the nutrition podcasts that I refer people to, I think that yours is number one. Can you tell people a little bit about how you got to where you're at

as a nutrition authority, as somebody who's educated in this space and kind of a little bit about your background just before we take off? I want them to know a little more about you yeah sure so before sigma nutrition was even a thing my academic background was an undergrad in biology and physics and i followed that up with a master's degree in nutritional science and after that i Nutrition, which I typically refer to as a company that puts out educational content around nutrition science. We also have a nutrition online consultancy, but most of my work is centered around the educational aspects.

That's primarily done through the podcast Sigma Nutrition Radio, which has been going since early 2014. So we're over six years going at this stage. And through that and other forms of media, whether that's written pieces or seminars and speaking engagements, the goal has been put out evidence-based information on nutrition through that. And yeah, luckily the podcast started to take off and has done quite well. And from there, people seem to still be listening to it, which is great. And so here we are. And that's the quick overview, I guess. Yeah. I've been listening to the show since it was in, before I got to triple digits episode numbers. So for quite some time, yeah, I particularly remember an episode

you did with a woman from UC Davis who is close to where I'm at, Dana Liss. It's close to where I'm at in California. And I remember that one just that sticks in my mind is perhaps the first one I heard, but I've been listening for quite some time. And for anybody who's listening, do go check that out after today's discussion. You'll be glad you did, particularly if you want to learn more about nutrition. The topic of kind of today's talk is going to be about nutrient timing and cutting and kind of making people's understanding of how they can impact their performance, their aesthetics with some of the finer details of nutrition. Now, in recent years, nutrient timing has kind of come, I don't want to say under fire, but it's been something that for very large portions of people's training careers,

they probably heard a lot coming from the bro community. Oh, you need to get your protein here. You need to get your carbs here. And then you have the evidence-based community that would prefer you probably focus on some bigger rocks before you focus on timing, which may have created this idea that nutrient timing isn't actually important at all. Is that the case or are there some things with nutrient timing that we know reliably can impact performance if people are hitting those big rocks? big rocks. Right. I think you outline it perfectly that we've heard about the benefits or the proposed benefits of different meal timings or nutrient timings for a long period of time. And in more recent years, people that have looked at the literature were like, hold on, some of this stuff isn't actually accurate. And that gets reduced down to this soundbite that some people

take away of saying, oh, nutrient timing doesn't matter, or my meal timing doesn't matter. As long as I hit my daily macros, then all is good. And I think that is just an overreaction to, again, some of those inaccurate claims that were made early on. So for example, old ideas that, oh, as soon as you get up in the morning, you have to have breakfast. You've got to stoke up your metabolism to get it going, right? We've seen quite clearly that's not the case. You don't need to eat as soon as you wake up. Eating a breakfast early versus a few hours later doesn't do anything to speed up your metabolism. Similarly, if you eat three larger meals versus six smaller meals doesn't change

metabolic rate in that way other myths were oh don't eat carbs after 6 p.m because it immediately gets stored as fat again we've seen that isn't really true either however that's not to say there may not be some benefits from how we time our carbohydrates so there's all these claims that were made either from let's say the bro, or there was even some within sports nutrition texts about the importance of nutrient timing of this is the most important thing for an athlete when you time your protein and your carbohydrates and so on, even above anything else. And so the pushback against those things was warranted. However, when it goes too far in that direction, and then people interpret that to mean there is no role for meal timing or no role for nutrient timing in various aspects, that's also just as incorrect. And so what's probably more accurate way to view this is we have to take things in each context separately.

And by that, I mean, first we have to distinguish, are we talking about what times of day we should eat meals? Or are we talking about what is the best timing for a specific nutrient, say protein? And then we have to work out, well, what is the goal of that? Are we talking about general health? Are we talking about performance? And so when we look at where we're at in relation to meal timing and nutrient timing, there's various aspects which we can get into depending on what area you want to go to. But for example, we know that the timing of your protein across the day does have an impact on the anabolic response to those feedings. Let's say if your goal is muscle growth,

if you eat protein once a day, even if that's, let's say 200 grams, that has a different impact than if you had to split that same amount of protein across four separate meals, your total muscle protein synthesis. So there's a timing aspect to that. Similarly, we know there's

a difference potentially for athletes where they time carbohydrates. We can get into that. And then from a health aspect, which is what I've been quite interested in for the last period of time, is asking the question, is there a difference of where we distribute our overall food intake? So where we place most of the calories, what time of day we eat meals, and then also maybe some of those aspects around say carbohydrates, do we need to put that at a specific time or not? So there's some of the questions that come up. And I think depending on the context, there's a different answer for how much each of those matters and how much we need to focus on. So to summarize, yes, those foundational pieces of your overall intake, your overall food quality,

macronutrients are all still of primary importance, but we shouldn't go to the other extreme and say nutrient timing or meal timing has no relevance. It absolutely does both for health and for performance. And we can get into any of those. No, no, I quite like that. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's a fundamentally wrong thing for the quote unquote evidence based community to look at some of those perhaps more egregious long held claims from the bro community, if you will.

I don't know what that noise is. Hold on. Oh, I think it's the garbage truck. We can what that noise is. Hold on. Oh, I think it's the garbage truck. We can edit that. Okay. So no worries. So I don't think it's unreasonable for us to look at some of those perhaps more egregious claims from the bro community that have skewed the evidence-based communities, I guess you

could say, way of looking at nutrient timing. It certainly matters. You've hit on protein, carbohydrate, and maybe we'll talk about fat. But I think looking at each of those macronutrients and talking about practical strategies people can use with the implementation of protein to optimize performance, carbohydrate to optimize performance, and even fat. And perhaps we just look at the window of how can we partition these across our day or around our workouts? Are there strategies people can implement with just the three macros to improve

aesthetics or performance? Yeah, so I think protein is the most clear cut and straightforward in that we know clearly if someone's goal centers around either gaining muscle mass, know clearly if someone's goal centers around either gaining muscle mass, retaining muscle mass while dieting, or even recovering from training sessions or sports, that we want to maximize the muscle protein synthesis response across the day. So that's just the response that relates to muscle repair and growth. And we see that there's a distribution impact here that, as I just mentioned in the previous example, it's not just about your total amount of protein. It's about having certain peaks in that anabolic response across the day will maximize that response. So it's not like you need to have a high protein feeding every hour that you're awake. In fact, it actually won't keep that response going. It seems to probably level off at about four-ish high protein feedings. And again, we may see slight differences, but

that's probably a good number to judge by. And so then if people did want to maximize that response for muscle, then they could think about, okay, how do I get four high protein feedings? And that could include their meals. It could include a snack. It could include a whey protein shake. And the dose of protein in each of those we know pretty well at this point is probably around 0.2 to 0.4 grams of protein for every kilogram of your body weight. So for, uh, that would be different for you guys in pounds math. It's too hard for me. Uh, but essentially it works out. You're probably for most average people looking at somewhere of like 20 to 40 grams of high quality protein in each of those meals. And that scales with your body weight, of course, and your muscle mass.

So a smaller female would probably be more on the 20 to 25 range. A bigger male might be more towards 35, 40. Right. Exactly. And then usually what I would advise is pushing that back even more into food-based terms. So once we know that figure, start familiarizing yourself with, okay, what type of food sources typically give me roughly 20 grams, 30 grams-ish of protein? And once you know what those are, most of your meals day-to-day end up being consistent, at least for most people. So knowing that, okay, a breast of chicken that is roughly this size is probably going to have 30, 35, 40 grams of protein. Or when I have this much Greek yogurt, it's going to give me this much amount of protein.

So get it down into food-based terms. And then just across your day, say, am I having three to four meals that have one of these high protein sources within them? And if I am, I'm probably doing pretty well. Then if someone really wants to dig in and go super analytical on it, they can, but for most people getting to the point of knowing what those high protein food sources are, and are they in, let's say three to four meals split across the day. And that's probably going to maximize all you need from a protein timing perspective. The only other part of that is the most obvious one that I think everyone is going to do naturally anyway, is probably within

30 to 60 minutes of finishing a training session, having a protein feeding there. That's almost, you can take that most people are going to do that anyway. So those would be the main things with protein distribution and protein timing. Carbohydrates is a bit different. So when it comes to general body composition and health, there are no hard set rules the same way there is for protein. And so if your carbohydrate intake for the whole day on average is in a level that fits your goals and keeps you within a certain calorie range and allows you to train for whatever your sporting endeavor is, then there's probably not dramatic differences from how you time those unless we're talking about a specific context. Unless we're talking about a specific context.

For example, let's say I'm talking if you're working with a wrestler or an MMA fighter or a triathlete and they train multiple times a day and very glycolytically demanding training sessions, so high carbohydrate use. Then timing their carbohydrates specifically after that first training session and in an amount that's going to make sure they can get their glycogen stores back up before their next training session is very important. For the average person who maybe trains once a day or three days a week or four days a week and is not a elite level athlete, then after they finish your training session, they have so much time before the next training session

or they probably haven't even used that much carbohydrate that they don't have so much time before the next training session, or they probably haven't even used that much carbohydrate that they don't have this real time pressure to get those carbs in immediately. So they can just get it in their normal meals over the next day or so. So it's kind of context dependent on the importance of specific carbohydrate timing like that, at least from a performance or training perspective. And then the area where it's even more of a gray area, which is where we might get to some of the chrononutrition stuff, is from a health aspect. Is there a benefit for how people time their carbohydrates?

I think there is a couple of areas that I think are quite promising that people could look at. One is that there's something that I'm sure a lot of people have heard before that's kind of quite a safe bet is when you think of your daily carbohydrate intake, think of that in and around your exercise or training session. So bookend the meals that come either side of that. If that's where most of your carbohydrates are at, it's probably a good idea. The days then you're not training, you're probably not going to have the same high carb intake. On days you are training hard, you're probably going to have more. And you put it in and around that training session when you're most able to use

those carbohydrates. I think that's a fairly safe recommendation. I think the other side of it then is for people who have issues with glycemic control. So this typically happens for people who maybe have pre-diabetes, maybe have type 2 diabetes, maybe they have metabolic syndrome, maybe they are insulin resistant. For those types of people, it may be useful to keep a bias of more of those carbohydrates to earlier in the day for a couple of reasons. One is that we know there's a natural change in your insulin sensitivity across the day, starting higher early in the day and tailing off later in the day. We know then your glycemic response to a meal is different in the morning versus at night. So if you have the same meal with carbohydrates

in the morning versus if you had that last thing before you go to bed, your blood glucose response after that meal is different. It's going to be worse just before bed. Now, how relevant that is for each person, again, depends on that context. If it's already someone who's trying to better control their glycemic response and may have some sort of clinical issue that that would benefit from, then yeah, we may want to avoid high carbohydrate amounts in the late evening and nighttime and push some of that earlier in the day. And there is some basis for that based on this area of chrononutrition or how that impacts our circadian rhythms or how our circadian rhythms impact how we can use that carbohydrate. But in general, there may be a benefit for a lot of people to think about, can I push at least some of that carbohydrate intake to a bit earlier in the day and maybe even

their meal timing to consider more of their total calories a bit earlier in the day. We can get into some of those specifics. So as you can see, there's quite a bit of nuance that's depending on the context of who we're actually talking about and what the goal of their diet actually is. Yeah, certainly. And I think it's good to just illuminate that there are, of course, levels to this. There's a lot of layers. And that just abandoning the idea of nutrient timing being important is perhaps a little bit risky, particularly because there is a lot of nuance here. There's a lot of opportunity to fine tune things to the individual, particularly protein and carbohydrate. It seems to be

that most of the strategies are somewhat intuitive, right? You want to spread your protein out across the day into relatively even sized feedings. And you might want to partition a lot of that carbohydrate around your training if you want to optimize it. But if you're not training super frequently, it's not too big of a deal. So it sounds like protein and carbohydrates we've covered. Are there any considerations for dietary fats or is that just kind of something that is a little bit less impactful because, again, what most people are doing with their traditional resistance training or even general athletics aren't nearly as contingent on dietary fat availability? Right. And I think the only consideration that becomes in any way common within practice that we tend to see is for athletes and where they time that in around training sessions, purely for the reason that we know that dietary fat will slow that transit time for a meal.

So the time for it to digest becomes a lot slower. So let's say an athlete is going to go and train in 90 minutes from now, and they want to have a pre-training snack, and it's going to be a pretty intensive session. We'd probably keep that a relatively low fat meal, higher in carbohydrate. The digestion time is going to be a bit quicker, and it's not going to be hanging around in their gastrointestinal tract for longer. Similarly, if we take that previous example, I said of a wrestler or a MMA fighter who has multiple training sessions in one day, they finished their first training session and maybe they only have five hours now before their next one. So we really want to focus on getting their glycogen stores back up with a high carbohydrate feeding that digests quite quickly. So we probably in that meal at least don't want to have a super high fat intake because that will just slow that process down but beyond those couple of scenarios there's no real major consideration for most

people of i need to stay away from fat or i need to purposely have a lot of fat at these specific times um the again there is some discussion we could have around the chrononutrition area where some discussion we could have around the chrononutrition area where late at night eating both carbohydrate or fat may be potentially problematic for some people in that we don't metabolize that in the same way if that meal was eaten earlier. And so we see changes in blood glucose, as I mentioned, but also in free fatty acids in the blood. Interestingly, there may not be the same problem there for protein. So people who are just say having a protein shake late at night, there's probably, there's no real deleterious effects in terms of those, like a blood glucose response or free

fatty acids in the blood because we're not consuming those. So that may be more beneficial. But apart from that, they're the only really considerations, I think, for a specific timing strategy. I quite like that. And I'm not aware of why this is, but I've heard it anecdotally and I felt it when I eat a high fat meal. Why is it that dietary fat slows digestion? Is it a chemical thing?

Is it a structural thing? Why is it that when you have a fattier meal it takes longer for your body to get through that yeah i believe it's just down to the metabolism of actual fat so to break down those fats that are there and for that that process to take place of breaking down your triglycerides and the free fatty acids, glycerol, all that type of stuff. So it's purely a metabolism issue that's just slowing that. It's good to know. So we've covered kind of now the case to make for nutrient timing as to how it impacts body composition and performance, which is why probably a lot of people listen to both of our podcasts. But I think you hit on it earlier. And I've seen the coaching space and

just the education space move more towards an emphasis on health. And you've brought up now chrononutrition and circadian rhythm a couple times. And I think a lot of people would really be interested in how nutrient timing and food selection might impact these things, where the research around chrononutrition is headed, and why this is a field that a lot of people in the nutrition space are really excited about. So could you kind of define for everybody before we dive into it, now that we've covered nutrient timing from a performance standpoint, what is the circadian rhythm? And how is that correlated with this kind of new kind of field in nutrition known as chrononutrition?

Yeah, so I think the best place to start is we know there's this general field of chronobiology, what looks at time-based phenomena within biology. And within that umbrella of chronobiology, we also have circadian biology, which looks at time-based phenomena with a certain time period. So as an example, if we think of various things within biology that run on a certain cycle, one would be the menstrual cycle of approximately 28 days, give or take, depending on the individual. But this is a cycle that repeats over and over again in certain biological systems. And as that kind of set period of 28 days, we have things that then are very short. For example, if you take a typical sleep cycle,

so when we go to sleep each night, we have multiple sleep cycles within one period of sleep. So they're about 90 minutes each. So that sleep cycle repeats several times over through a bout of sleep. So one 90-minute sleep cycle is a time period that repeats over and over. So we have these things that have a long time period, some that are short. Then we have ones that are about 24 hours. And this is what people will have heard of as a circadian rhythm. So something that that time period where that cycle repeats over and over is about 24 hours. And there's many things within the human

body that follow this circadian rhythm. Some that I've mentioned, for example, insulin sensitivity, that pattern that it has starting highest and going down, that just repeats over and over every 24 hours. If you think of the hormones like cortisol, for example, does the same. Testosterone, they have these patterns that go throughout the day and they repeat every 24 hours, the same looking pattern. So this is a circadian rhythm and we have these internal circadian clocks in various tissues around our body that help to set that rhythm. Now, we have one main central circadian clock that's located in the hypothalamus of the brain. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the SCN, or more colloquially, you just refer to it as the master clock or central clock.

or more colloquially you just refer to it as the master clock or central clock. And this takes stimulus or stimuli from our environment and allows us to fine-tune those rhythms that we have in our body, so the various hormones running on a rhythm of about 24 hours, and it allows us to fine-tune that to a more exact 24 hours to match up with our day. So our solar day is exactly 24 hours. But if we had no input from our environment, these circadian rhythms would stay running at about 24 hours, but actually on average, a bit longer than that. And so over time, they'd start to get slightly mismatched. So what we do is we use various stimuli from our environment to help fine-tune

or entrain these rhythms. Now, the main thing that's going to do that is exposure to light and dark for obvious reasons. It's a way for our body to tell, is it daytime and is it nighttime? And so we use that blast of light that comes into our eye to essentially tell our clocks that, hey, it's daytime now or it's nighttime. So where this all then comes into the area of nutrition is that as the research developed in the area around circadian rhythms and how that influences health, we saw that nutrients and when we consume food can potentially help set or entrain some of those circadian clocks. So it's not just light exposure, but other things can also influence it. Now, feeding doesn't really influence that central clock the way that light does, but we have all these other peripheral circadian clocks

in tissues around the body. And when we consume food, it seems to be able to have an influence on those. So the hypothesis then was, well, if feeding can influence some of these circadian clocks, and then our master clock is regulated by the light and dark cycle, and we want these processes running at specific times of the day, then it makes sense there may be better times and worse times to consume nutrients to give signals to these certain clocks. And so that's where this area of chrononutrition more broadly looks at is what is that intersection or that relationship between feeding our circadian clocks and therefore our health. And then there's two

ways that we can look at that. We can look at when we eat food, how that influences circadian rhythms. And then we can look at processes that run on a circadian rhythm how does that influence what we should eat so for example by not let's say by eating food in the middle of the night that is something that we see correlated with poor health outcomes we see really bad blood glucose responses free fatty acids go really high, and there's negative consequences to eating a meal during the middle of the night. It's mismatched between when we should be set up

to be able to handle that meal, and we get a worse metabolism of that meal. So that's a time where we're seeing that mismatch because we're eating at a time that is not synchronized to when we would want to. On the other side of the relationship, we have, like I said, if we know there's instant sensitivity is different across different points of day, that may suggest, hey, maybe I might be better timing my carbohydrates to be more in line with that. Or at least knowing for someone who has issues with

glycemic control, having a lot of those carbohydrates late at night may not be the best idea because that's when they're least insulin sensitive, or in other words, more insulin resistant. And these are some of the ideas that started to come about from that, and they started to be explored. And so there's many areas we could look at to get into that, but some would be around when we time those meals. The other would be with the same amount of food across the day, where we distribute most of those calories, does that make a difference? Another element would be consistency of meals day to day. And then the final one would be the length of a feeding window.

And that opens up the whole field around time restricted feeding, which people may have heard of. So there's all those different elements that collectively, we could come under this umbrella of chrononutrition. And it's typically when we talk about meal timing related to its impact on the circadian system. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot to unpack with this and that it's not simply to the point you made just another adaptation of some type of time restricted feeding. It sounds like there's a lot of layers here. You kind of work through like four specific instances where it's going to impact. For people who are at home, just like practically trying to grasp like, okay, I get a

little bit about my circadian rhythm. Maybe they have some blue blockers. Maybe they're trying to fine tune some things on their own. What are ways that they can kind of look at the things you outlined and start to implement? Perhaps it is working with when they're most insulin sensitive. Perhaps it is trying not to disrupt those circadian clocks by eating large meals in the middle of the night. What are the most practical examples of working with this circadian biology and trying to kind of take the training wheels on approach to chrononutrition, if you will? Right. And that's a great question. And I would first make people aware that there are a lot of questions that are still unanswered in this area. And I don't want anything that I've

just said to seem overwhelming of there's so much here to try and understand for me just to be able to eat healthy. This doesn't undermine any of the basic principles around nutrition. There are some of these things that I've said that, again, are just hypotheses that still need more research. There's some of these things that I said that, again, are just hypotheses that still need more research. However, in terms of practically what we can do, I do think there are a few general recommendations or heuristics that would have a good amount of support that may be beneficial from a health perspective. One that I've mentioned is we know quite clearly eating during biological night is probably not a great idea if you can help that at all. Now, that's going to be a different challenge depending on who we're talking about.

If we have someone who is maybe listening who's a doctor right now working in the emergency department and doing 24-hour shifts, it might not be as much of an option. might not be as much of an option. But generally for those of us who can set up our day in a certain way, then probably not eating during biological night is probably a good idea. So like staying, if you're staying up really late, having like large meals late into night, maybe better to distribute that a bit earlier. That's a kind of simple way to think about it. Another one would be to think about the length of your feeding window. So we have studies that show that on average, a lot of people in the general population might eat pretty soon after waking up and almost stay having until their last meal is close to bed. So they get like a 15, 16 hour feeding window. And where a lot of the benefits from time-restricted feeding seem to come is just restricting that

down to a certain amount, whether that's a 12 hour feeding window, 10, 8, whatever's manageable for someone seems to have a lot of knock on benefits. Now, whether they are physiological benefits or whether it just changes our behavior or overall food intake is different. I do think, again, from a practical perspective, it's a very easy way for people to control their overall intake. It's a very simple heuristic to follow. And so even if it's purely for those reasons of helping us to control overall intake, there's a benefit there. I also think it probably prevents

that real late night eating that I mentioned, if we know we have a cutoff time. So I'd say to people, if you've never done this, maybe start with like a 12-hour feeding window. So if you have your breakfast at 8 a.m., have the last thing you eat is going to be no later than 8 p.m. and go with a schedule like that and then see how you feel and if that responds well. So I think a feeding window is one to look at. The other big one I would say is the consistency of our meal timing day to day. So this just means each day when we normally have our meals, are they at roughly the same time and roughly the same frequency, or do you have these dramatic changes? What's referred to in the research as erratic eating. So one day you have three square meals across the day. The next day, then you don't eat anything until 6 p.m., but then

you're like four or five meals in the evening. The next day you're eating all over the place. That seems to be correlated with some negative outcomes as well. So I would get people to start thinking of that in the same way they think about sleep and wake times, if they're not already doing that. That it's not just the length of time you're asleep for, like if you're getting seven or eight hours a night. It also seems that there's a benefit to the consistency, that your bedtime is approximately the same and your wake time is approximately the same day to day. That goes beyond just the number of hours you're getting. goes beyond just the number of hours you're getting. So try and apply that similarly to your meals,

not to a point of obsession, but roughly are your meals happening at the same point from day to day is probably going to be a beneficial thing to do and is hopefully for a lot of people not too stressful. So there are some of the things I would think about. And then finally, if they're doing those and all of that is pretty easy to follow, and they want to go a bit further with the chrono stuff, then I think it becomes start looking at that distribution of your overall food intake. Can maybe more of that come a slightly earlier in the day? And that doesn't have to be a dramatic change. It may just mean if a large amount of your calories come in your, say your final meal at 8pm that someone eats, if they're saving up a lot of their calories for that meal,

it might just mean take some of those from that meal and put them earlier in the day somewhere on that midpoint of the day. That may also have some practical benefits for people. And again, there's a lot of nuance here of who this may be better suited for. So for example, if it's an athlete trying to eat more food, probably not going to work. Or if it's an athlete that has a big training session in the evening, it may not be as necessary. But for the average person trying to stay healthy, then these might be relatively simple rules that take care of some other stuff. So that's kind of where I would start of some of the practical stuff we're thinking of.

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Just pay shipping back to the show. No, I quite like that. And one of the things that kind of pops up for me, and this might be a question anybody listening might have, is these mechanisms that are perhaps influenced by when we eat. And maybe we're looking at shifting a larger percentage of our caloric intake to earlier in the day. And that perhaps being correlated with positive health markers or perhaps better longevity. Are these, I guess you might call them evolved mechanisms, are these

things that the organism has kind of over time done better with and that our new lifestyle with increased food availability that we can get anytime? Are those heavily disrupted by not eating on a schedule? And is this kind of, I guess what I'm trying to get at here is how closely knit to our 200,000 years as a species is this window? And are we disrupting it more than perhaps we thought now that we've unlocked this idea in this field of chrononutrition? Yeah. So there's probably a couple of ways you could take that. One, I think, is before even getting into the evolutionary biology, people might just say, well, we know now because of our food environment that just eating normally or as we wish is very, very difficult. So we need to put some sort of restriction in place. But I do think there is a basis also from an evolutionary perspective. And all of those things, or those heuristics I said, are based on the idea of thinking about our

circadian biology and thinking about how we keep that in check and how we get light exposure at the right time, how do we sleep at the right time, and therefore, maybe how do we eat at the right time. And if we think about that through an evolutionary lens, we would have had the foraging for food and then the consumption of food happening during the day. And then once it becomes evening time and nighttime and it's dark outside, there's nothing

to keep people awake per se. That's why sleep onset happens. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve.

Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. So if someone was to go camping, we know that because when it gets dark outside that is going to allow them to get proper sleep on set they've no artificial lighting that keeps them awake and so it's feasible that from an evolutionary biology perspective there is uh would be a more likelihood of matching up that food intake to daylight hours let's say but an evolutionary biologist could probably speak more to that. Purely from a circadian perspective, we know that that's why most of those heuristics that I gave match up with, based on what our circadian biology is doing, is there a basis to maybe push some of this food intake earlier in the day?

And at least some of the data at this point would seem to suggest that there may be a benefit to doing so. Some of the reasons we touched on already about, say, glycemic responses later in the day, others now that are looking at the impact on energy expenditure. So does this potentially impact the diet-induced thermogenesis? So in other words, how many calories we burn after a meal, that seems to be different based on time of day. There's others looking at maybe could it feasibly impact our physical activity? There was one study out of Bath that suggested that it may. Others haven't found that same difference. So there's at least a hypothesis that if there's more of those calories consumed earlier in the day, as opposed to back-ended right at the end of the day, there may be an impact on

energy expenditure. Now, if that were to be the case and we were to find out that, yes, this is what is happening, then that would mean we may see different impacts on, let's say, body composition for the same caloric intake. Now, again, that hasn't been seen to be the case, and that is quite speculative at the moment. But beyond that, we do know there are impacts on some of those metabolic health markers. Yeah, no, there's a lot there. You did mention that perhaps there is an impact on the thermic effect of food response based on time of day? Is that mostly speculative or is there some kind of new research there that is somewhat exciting to you? Because to me, that's very interesting. Yeah, there's been a couple of studies that have done that. So the setup would

essentially be the same meal consumed in the morning and versus the evening. And you look at the energy expenditure in the digestive period after those meals, and there's a significant difference in the diet-induced thermogenesis or that thermic effect of feeding post-meal. Now, how much a significant finding like that translates into, let's say, the absolute number of calories is variable in a couple of those studies and how significant that would be on to long-term weight is still what has to be worked out but it does seem there's a basis that it could potentially impact that at least from at least two studies and possibly a few more and then like I

said there was other studies suggesting it may impact our low intensity physical activity across the day. So not training, but just more movement in around the day may go up when more of our calories are consumed earlier. And then there's other things we could speculate on, right? For example, if you do your training session in the afternoon and you typically have your large meal in the evening, if I were to take more of those calories and put them three hours before you go and train, could you get a better training session? Maybe do a bit more volume?

I'm not too sure, but it's a thought process we might go through. But yeah, we do see a couple of studies that have looked at the thermic effect of feeding. Yeah, no, I think it's interesting. And I think as people start to kind of unpack this, they're probably listening, thinking, okay, you know, hey, there is a little bit more to nutrient timing than I thought. And there's even a way that I can tailor this to match some of my natural biological tendencies and what my body's trying to do. And they're probably thinking like, hey, this is actually quite interesting. And as somebody like yourself, who's kind of on the forefront of a lot of this research, it's I know it's of interest to you, but you're particularly well

versed. What are some of the avenues that chrononutrition is kind of moving into? Or what are some of the more exciting things on the horizon, even if there isn't definitive data that are exciting to you that people might be interested in hearing? Yeah, so there's lots of good work going on here. And actually, at Sigma Nutrition, our research communication officer, Alan Flanagan, is currently doing his PhD in coronal nutrition at the University of Surrey. And they're doing some really cool human trials right now. And I think over the next couple of years, they will be, along with some of the other

groups in the UK, really getting at this question of the energy distribution and how that has impacts on both metabolic health and maybe some of the stuff around that we discussed around energy expenditure. Do those things actually play out or not? So I think that is a really interesting area of how much that distribution of calories across the day matters. So there's a couple of really good studies ongoing from the groups in the UK right now. I think other areas that people find interesting related to chrono would be nutrition for shift workers. And in fact, the same group and Alan's master's thesis was actually recently published as a paper that looked at some of the feeding for nurses doing shift work, for example. And then another group recently has published some of the nutritional habits of shift workers that were police officers as well. And so trying to think about for those that are doing shift work and are going to be, let's say, up during the night, knowing that it's not the ideal time to eat from a circadian

perspective, are there strategies that may help them? So for example, one of the hypotheses that some of those groups were thinking is, well, with the nurses or other staff that work during the night, we know that there's going to be a worse response to large carbohydrate and fat feedings. So could we maybe rely on more high protein snacks and lower in carbs and lower in fat throughout the, let's say the real danger period, so to speak, quote unquote, of let's say 1am to 4 or 5am and then keep their, their carbohydrates for the day out at either extreme thoughts like that. So I think that's an area that hopefully more questions will, will come up in because it's a, an area that many shift workers want to try and find an answer to. And it's very difficult given all the challenges that they already face, plus the behavioral component that goes into that,

and just the tough situations that are related to a shift anyway. So I think they're a few of the areas I find most interesting, but specific to chrono, the first one I said would be how this energy distribution plays out. Getting some of those studies in will be really informative. That's really interesting. And I think we can't really have a discussion about nutrients and the timing of nutrients and the timing of feedings that kind of bumping into intermittent fasting. And I think a lot of people might just be like, well, is this guy just kind of saying like you just have to do intermittent fasting? Could you just kind of really briefly just touch on perhaps like, okay, this is hard and fast fasting. This is the kind of explorative space

that is chrononutrition. Here's why they're different, not the same thing. Sure. So fasting is a umbrella term for a number of different interventions that people have came across. The most common that I'm sure people are thinking, or this is the same as time-restricted feeding, would be a daily intermittent fast, something like an eight-hour feeding window and 16-hour fasting window, which we'll come back to. There are, of course, other types of fasting. There's multiple-day fasting.

There's 24-hour, 36-hour fasting, let's say once a week. There's alternate day fasting, which is a fasting day every second day, as the name suggests. There's a 5-2 fasting protocol where you have five normal days of eating and any two of the days across the week are fasting days, which typically have about 500 calories still within them, but are referred to as fasting days. So there's many different, almost an unending number of protocols we could come up with that would be some degree of fasting. With daily intermittent fasting, or like a 6-8 fasting, or the lean gains protocol, or these various types of intermittent fasting that happen every day on a recurring basis that people will think about. The difference between that and a time-restricted

feeding protocol is simply that the time-restricted feeding protocols came out of that circadian research. So it was set up with the idea of how do we set our food intake to match up essentially with daylight, that daytime where we're best set up to handle that meal. So it's for some of the health and metabolic reasons. If we compress it into this window, does our food intake match up with that daytime? Whereas what most people stumble across intermittent fasting, at least if they're doing it for body composition reasons or say following something like lean gains, is they're coming at it as this intermittent fasting is just a really convenient way for me to restrict my calories or I just enjoy keeping most

of my calories until later in the day. And so I'm just going to fast for until the afternoon and then put my calories at this time point. So the end result of a like a daily intermittent fast like a lean gains versus a time restricted feeding protocol with a eight hour feeding window on paper are going to look the exact same right and they are from that perspective it's just where they came from is looking at it through two different lens um where so i think most commonly those daily intermittent fasting for body comp comes from people just looking as a convenient way to either restrict calories or control calories, or they just like eating later in the day. Time-restricted feeding more has these roots within circadian biology and these health markers. Yeah, so they may be similar in perhaps just the way they look, but they're born out of very, very different rationales. And I think that it's important to just underline that because somebody might have just been hearing this and going,

oh, I'll just keep intermittent fasting and I'll get all the same benefits of chrononutrition when in fact they're quite different in practice. So I think we've covered a lot of really interesting things. We've kind of, again, like I said, kind of paved the way for the chrononutrition discussion talking about nutrient timing. And I'd like to circle the wagons here in closing and just kind of reiterate some of the points that you brought up. and dietary fat intake. Could you just one more time for the listeners circle or hit on protein feeding, space and duration, carbohydrate timing, and fat intake? Sure. So for someone whose focus is primarily body composition, let's say, and they're regularly doing resistance training and presuming that stimulus is adequate, then their protein feeding should probably be at least three to four high protein feedings split across the day.

Let's say with multiple hours, at least between each of those. And each of those meals is going to be, like we said, somewhere probably in the range of 20 to 40 grams on average, depending on the size of that person and their individual requirements. Then with carbohydrate for general body composition and resistance training, they don't need a super high carb intake per se to do the training. It's probably going to be individual responses to that. But you just want enough carbohydrate around that you can perform adequately at the type of training intensity that you're going to go out and the type of training program you have.

And in terms of how you distribute that, it may not make a big difference, I would say, for a lot of the people who are, let's say, leaner individuals who have been training a while, who know where to put, and they're getting enough daily carbs. For some people who are maybe trying to control their blood sugar a bit better, or people who have some metabolic dysfunction, then it may make more sense for them to keep their carbohydrates to just in and around their workout time, as opposed to large carbohydrate meals at other times. And so that's from that perspective. And then when it gets into athletic performance, this is totally context dependent on your sport,

your training schedule and what you need. But essentially you want to make sure you have carbohydrate available at the times you need it. So in training sessions where performance is a priority or certain for competition, you want to go into them with full stores of glycogen. So your previous number of days, you should account how much carbohydrate have you taken in. And then if you're training multiple times a day, paying attention to getting enough carbohydrates in between those training sessions

is important too, but there's a lot of context there. So that's from an overview of the athletic performance side. And then just to round off on dietary fat, for most people, they don't need to overly really worry about this. For athletes, they may just decide for my post-workout shake or my meal that's close to training time, I won't go super high in fat. I'll keep it for other parts of the day, but that's about as much nuance as they may need. No, I like that. And it leaves people with something that's quite actionable and they can go, okay, so I understand the nuts and bolts of how I can effectively impact nutrient timing. Now on the other side of the coin, if people are

perhaps more interested in health and longevity and strategizing how to implement perhaps food with their chrononutrition or their circadian biology. What are those little take-home points, particularly when to orient food on the 24-hour scale, maybe perhaps when to avoid eating? Just reiterating that one more time. Sure. So from a kind of health chrononutrition perspective, some of the easy bullet points for people to try, I would say would be to maybe try a feeding window if they haven't done it before, just to see how they react. Maybe start with a 12 hour window. So from you start at 8am, you go to 8pm or your first meal is at 6am, then you go to 8 p.m., or your first meal is at 6 a.m., you go to 6 p.m., just try that out and see how it works for you. Try and not have a really large meal, say, just before you go to bed

or trying to eat late into the biological night. Probably, if those things are going well and you want to try a slightly earlier calorie distribution, that may work well. So if you find that you're saving up calories and having them all in one large meal right at the end of the day, taking some of those calories and putting that into a meal earlier in the day may be of benefit to you. And then just trying to get relatively consistent mealtimes without being too obsessive from day to day of how can they be relatively consistent in the same way we try and have relatively consistent sleep times. And I think starting with those things and seeing how they

respond, and then from there you can get as deep into trying some other stuff out as you wish. Yeah, I like that. And it seems like a lot of these practices can kind of exist simultaneously. You can play with trying to optimize your nutrient timing for performance, as well as trying to align those calories across the day, so long as you're perhaps not somebody who's forced to train much later in the evening or you work on a shift. I really, really like all of that stuff. And obviously, you have an excellent handle on these nutritional topics, particularly due to your education background. But for people who just want to learn more, where are some places they can go? Obviously, they should be subscribed to your

podcast and checking your website regularly. But what are some places you recommend people go to look for nutritional information in a space that's so clouded with so many, perhaps less than ideal sources of information. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, thanks for the mention of the podcast. If you like getting the nerdy details, that's what we tend to talk about. From a more, if people want to go and just read some stuff themselves, starting with maybe a couple of books, ones I typically recommend.

For ones around appetite, how we tend to overeat, things that tie into obesity and so on. I think Stefan Guine's book, The Hungry Brain is fantastic. And it's very readable. It's made for to be understandable by pretty much anyone, but it also includes all the science in there as well. So that would be one. I think for people with a focus on body composition and how their nutrition ties into their training and body comp, then my friend Eric Helms, along with his coauthors, Andrea Valdez and Andy Morgan wrote a couple of fantastic books, The Muscle and Strength Pyramids. So there's one for training, but there's also a nutrition one. And that brings you through all the fundamental aspects around nutrition that

tie into eating for body composition. And I think if people were to get to grips with a lot of the principles within that, they'd be set up for a long period of time. So that'd be two on the side of books. Obviously the podcast. Then if people want to go deeper, there are various research reviews they may think about depending on how in-depth they want to go. If they really want to kind of nerd out, they can always go to a university textbook on nutrition,

but that may be for, again, some of the nerds in the audience. And those be the first places to start. And yeah, go for there. Yeah, no, Danny, thank you so much for coming on and again, wrapping everything up in a really succinct, concise way. I'm sure anybody who's made it this far is probably interesting

and continuing to follow the work you're doing. Where is the best place for people to find you on the various social media outlets? And again, the podcast. Sure. So probably the easiest, if they just go to Sigma nutrition.com, they can find everything there. Sigma nutrition radio is on all podcast apps and Spotify. And then for me on social media, I'm on Instagram, Danny Lennon underscore Sigma. And then I'm on Twitter, Nutrition Danny. So any of those places, I'm happy to take people's questions and comments. All right, man. Well, hey, thank you so much for coming on.

We'll have you again soon, sure, to talk about some other stuff. But I really appreciate your time. Awesome, man. Thank you for having me. And hopefully people enjoyed this. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. Again, make sure you give Danny a follow on his various social media platforms and do subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Radio. It's a podcast I've been listening to forever and I

find it's unloaded with a lot of really interesting health, fitness, and nutrition information. Thanks again so much to Danny for coming on today. And I wanted to encourage you guys, if you enjoyed the episode, share it. Screenshot it and tag us in your IG story. Share it there so me and Danny can see it. We'd really, really appreciate it. And I want to get this stuff out there so more people can understand the nuance of nutrition and become better at taking care of their bodies. Thanks so much for listening to the Dynamic Dialogue podcast.

Have a good day.