Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Sleep Better, Boost Your Gut Health and Get More Energy | Professor Satchin Panda #388

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 306 of the podcast with leading expert in the field of circadian rhythms, Dr. Sachin Panda. Sachin's research on the impact of circadian clocks on our health is truly groundbreaking and he has revolutionized our understanding of health and wellbeing. In this clip, he shares a simple tip to help you sleep better, boost your gut health and get more energy. Please note the advice in this episode may not be suitable if you are suffering with

Starting point is 00:01:53 or recovering from an eating disorder. The whole conversation around nutrition for many years, and even now, is still dominated by what we should be eating. But your research beautifully demonstrates that timing a food intake is something we also need to pay a lot of attention to. 50% of adults eat for 15 hours or longer. And we all evolved on this planet with 24 hours light-dark cycle and eating-fasting cycle. So that's why we are designed to go through this

Starting point is 00:02:35 at least 12 to 14 hours of fasting every day. Our gut lining and many parts of our body actually gets a lot of damage throughout the day and they have to be repaired and that repair process happens only when we are in our deep sleep and also we are fasting i have seen with hundreds maybe thousands of patients that when people compress their reading windows, you see benefits across the board. Weight loss, blood sugar, energy, sleep quality. So I'm a passionate advocate of your work, and I've been using it with real-life people. One almost universal recommendation I have with

Starting point is 00:03:20 most of my patients is let's at least start off making sure you're eating all of your food within a 12-hour window maximum. Yes, that's a good starting point. Just try 12 hours for the first two weeks. In all of our clinical studies, what we do is we ask people to choose a 10-hour window that suits their lifestyle. And it's also, it gives them a sweet spot that they can still have their social life and enjoy life and improve their health. With some caveat, that your first meal

Starting point is 00:03:55 should be at least an hour after waking up, and your last meal should be two to three hours before going to bed. So within that window, you're gonna choose that 10 hours that works for you. And in both mouse studies and in human studies, what we're finding is if people can do this 10 hours for five days in a week or six days in a week, and they can have one cheat day where they can go a little bit outside the eating window, we still see many benefits.

Starting point is 00:04:27 they can go a little bit outside the eating window, we still see many benefits in people who have one or multiple items of metabolic syndrome. So that means they have obesity plus high blood pressure, high triglyceride, or high blood sugar, even multiple of these conditions. And what we find is if they can do 10 hours for 12 weeks, then we do see improvement in almost all of these elements of metabolic syndrome. Blood pressure improvement happens within six to eight weeks. Blood sugar also improves in 10 to 12 weeks. Another thing that we are finding is when people control the timing of their food, they

Starting point is 00:05:09 also seem to sleep well. And once their sleep improves, then the repair process improves. And once somebody sleeps well, then the food craving and craving for energy-dense diet that also goes down. So that means by controlling timing, we can inadvertently change the nutrition quality and quantity. And that's now seen in many clinical trials with time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting. People, although they are asked to eat within eight,

Starting point is 00:05:47 nine or 10 hours window and then leave the rest as fasting, when you go back to analyzing what they ate, then what we find is they modestly reduce their calorie intake by somewhere between five to 10 and some cases, some people can reduce even by 20%, which is pretty good because intentional calorie restriction is very hard for people to reduce calorie by even 10 to 20% every single day is very hard.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Second thing is since they're sleeping well, then they also improve their nutrition choice. So in almost every study, we find people reduce their alcohol intake. Of course there is less opportunity to drink alcohol. And then they also reduce processed food. And we don't know why, but it may be because

Starting point is 00:06:36 they're sleeping well, because the sleep deprived brain actually looks for highly processed food. And when people sleep well then they can take that decision. I think everyone intuitively knows that. Even if they don't understand the science, I think everyone knows that experience when they haven't slept well. Yes, you can talk to the science of leptin and ghrelin

Starting point is 00:06:57 and the hunger hormone goes through the roof and your satiety hormone goes down. But actually, I think we all know when we haven't slept well, we want more caffeine. We crave more food. This happened to me a few days ago. Hungry all the time and you're not craving healthy whole foods at that time. You're craving high energy dense foods. Yeah. Although quality and quantity of nutrients are very important, by focusing on timing, one can improve those two aspects too. So if you have some health issues, there are benefits.

Starting point is 00:07:32 But what about that person listening who goes, I kind of feel okay. I haven't got prediabetes. I haven't got much of a weight issue. What are the benefits for me, Dr. Panda, of eating all my food within a 10-hour eating window? I think everybody would agree that they need a little bit more energy. Yeah. And they may not have other health issues, but many of us, we have a little joint problem,

Starting point is 00:07:55 we feel a little pain. And overall, other things that we are finding biochemically and with all the gene expression analysis, what we're finding is the kidney function improves, our muscle repair also improves. There are now new studies showing that circadian clock is involved in repairing tendons and ligaments. So injuries. Injuries, particularly recovery from injuries. And if we think about it, actually every day we injure some of our joints, ligaments, and muscles. We are on a continuous rejuvenation process. And that's why I say that just like our brain,

Starting point is 00:08:34 when it sleeps, it resets, rejuvenates, and repairs itself. Almost every tissue in our system repairs itself. So let's go into timing, okay? Lots of things happen in the body when we have a period of time without foods. Reduction in inflammation, change in genetic expression, ability to repair and rejuvenate better. But I guess there's an ideal body clock that if the modern world didn't drive us to do certain things at certain times that we could all beautifully follow and then there's real life for many people. So let's start off by going what does an ideal body clock

Starting point is 00:09:14 look like for someone let's say they wake up. I know you're a big fan of saying that we should try not to eat for the first hour after waking up. Why is that? So most of us, when we wake up, we're waking up to an alarm clock. So that means our sleep hormones are still high. Although we just dragged ourselves out of the bed, our hormones, particularly melatonin, is still pretty high. And that takes an hour or two to go down.

Starting point is 00:09:47 And within 45 minutes of waking up, our stress hormone cortisol reaches its peak. So this is the time when you can say changing of the guards, that happens in the morning. So the sleep hormones are coming down, the stress hormones are going up, and your body is actually not ready to digest food and assimilate nutrients perfectly. Most of us still have pretty high level of melatonin which

Starting point is 00:10:12 can inhibit insulin release. So if we eat something or drink tea with milk and sugar, to process that a body has to produce and release sufficient amount of insulin, which may not happen properly in the first one hour. So I think that's a very practical tip that everyone, no matter what diet they choose to follow, no matter what culture they're from, no matter what country they live in, that seems like quite a good universal principle for all of us. Whenever you wake up for the first hour, don't eat any food. But you're also saying no coffee or tea with milk and or sugar. You've done a lot of science on this, right?

Starting point is 00:10:57 Which is clearly in the times in which we live, a lot of people need that science to persuade them that this is something I should be doing. But if we just zoom out for a minute and look back at our evolutionary history as humans, actually, it's hard to make the case that we would have been eating consistently over 13, 14, 15 hours in every 24 hours. We would have naturally had these long periods where we didn't eat in every 24 hours. So yes, there's science to support it, but there's also, if we look at our lives through an evolutionary lens, it kind of works as well, doesn't it?

Starting point is 00:11:38 Yeah, it does. And in fact, our ancestors, hunter-gatherers or farmers, they didn't have access to plenty of food. And another thing was they didn't have access to processed food. So food was not ready for consumption any time of the day. So in the morning, people typically spend time gathering food or preparing for cooking. And the first substantial meal was maybe around lunchtime. Can you summarize? If anyone listening to this goes, okay, I'm going to now try and eat all of my foods

Starting point is 00:12:14 within a 10-hour eating window. Can you list what are some of the benefits they may get? the benefits they may get. Yeah, so once people eat within 10 hours eating window, what we find is within few days, that may be two to three weeks, they may find their sleep will improve. And this is something that we find in many of our patients who self-report how is their sleep. It may not increase the number of hours they sleep, butreport how is their sleep, it may not increase the number of hours they sleep, but it may just improve their sleep satisfaction.

Starting point is 00:12:50 They might actually get into a better sleep, quality of sleep will improve. Then those who have acid reflux, I don't know the numbers in the UK, but in the US, there are 65 million prescriptions for acid reflux written every year. And there is a lot of over-the-counter acid reflux medication. So that means almost more than half of the adult population experiences some kind of acid reflux or stomach issues every week. So we also hear that people have much better gut health within two to four weeks.

Starting point is 00:13:29 They will feel that so sleeping better and then having better gut health will also improve the sense of energy in the morning and throughout the day we think that these three benefits are the positive feedback loop that helps people to sustain with 10 hours eating window just Just at the end here now, for people who feel inspired by what you said, who think, yeah, you know what? I think I want to give this a try. Do you have any final kind of top tips to share with people to leave them with so they can take your work

Starting point is 00:13:57 and use it to improve the quality of their lives? Any duration of fasting is better than no fasting but if you want to optimize there is better to eat within your active period for humans it will be finishing your dinner by 6 or 7 p.m and that will give you the best benefit by the same time we have to keep in mind that in the pursuit of perfection we should not forget what is practical and what suits your life. You should try to do that. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful

Starting point is 00:14:32 weekend. I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Sleep Better, Boost Your Gut Health and Get More Energy | Professor Satchin Panda #388

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