Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D., is a leading researcher in a very important field of study: the circadian rhythm, which is the topic of his book, “Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy and Sleep Well Every Night.” It’s a great read, written at a level that is easy to understand.
Growing up on a farm in India, he was initially intrigued by the fact that he slept best during the summertime. Then, going through agricultural school, he realized that different plants flower at certain times of the day.
“A few years later, when I was thinking about grad school, I realized there are so many things about biology of time,” Panda says. “Every biological system depends on time; just like throughout the day we have a clear timetable when we should be doing this and that — meeting people and having conversation and having dinner.
Every organism has that [but] we haven’t learned the biology of time. That’s why I got excited about circadian rhythms, because this is a universal timing system, starting from pond scum to humans … Every organism has to go through this 24-hour timing schedule.
If this is disrupted, then plants will flower at the wrong time and animals will not reproduce well. In humans, lots of different diseases can happen. That’s why I got excited about circadian rhythms and got into my Ph.D. Now I’m at the Salk Institute, a nonprofit research organization in San Diego, California.”
Circadian Rhythms Are Under Genetic Control
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three U.S. biologists — Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young — for their discovery of master genes that control your body’s circadian rhythms.1,2,3,4,5 Panda explains:
“The bottom line is almost every cell in our body has its own clock. In every cell, the clock regulates a different set of genes, [telling them] when to turn on and [when to] turn off.
As a result, almost every hormone in your body, every brain chemical, every digestive juice and every organ that you can think of, its core function rises and falls at certain times of the day [in a coordinated fashion].
For example, your growth hormone might rise in the middle of the night, in the middle of sleep. At the same time, if there is not [too much] food in your stomach, then the stomach lining will start to repair. For that repair to work perfectly, the growth hormone from the brain has to coincide with the stomach repair time.
In that way, different rhythms in different parts of our body have to work together for the entire body to work optimally. In fact, to have these daily rhythms and sleep-wake cycle, being more alert in the morning, having the bowel movement at the right time, having better muscle tone in the afternoon, these rhythms are the fountain of health. That’s the indication of health.”
Shift Work Disrupts Your Circadian Rhythm
The idea that you could possibly micromanage this intricately timed system from the outside is foolish in the extreme. As Panda notes in his book, the key, really, is to pay attention to and honor ancient patterns of waking, sleeping and eating.6 By doing that, your body more or less takes care of itself automatically.
“Yes, to leverage these daily rhythms that are so ingrained in our body, we just have to do a few things: sleep at the right time, eat at the right time, and get a little bit of bright light during the daytime. That’s the foundation. We can do very simple things to reap the benefits of the circadian rhythm and the wisdom of our body,”Panda says.
One of the most common circadian anomalies in today’s modern world is shift work. If you’re like me, you might be under the misconception that it’s a relatively small minority of people that engage in this activity, but Panda cites research showing a full 20 to 25 percent of the American nonmilitary workforce disrupt their natural circadian rhythm by working nights.
In his book, shift work is defined as any work that requires you to stay awake for three hours or more between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. for more than 50 days a year (basically once a week).
The fact that 1 in 4 is exposed to this circadian rhythm aberration is bad enough, but on top of that there are the health effects of dirty electricity and the unhealthy light spectrum emitted by pulsing light-emitting diodes (LED) and fluorescent lighting, which further exacerbates the problem.
“Only in the last 16 years we have come to understand the impact of light on our health,” Panda says. “Before this, we thought that lighting is only for vision. Our eyes just have retinal cone cells to guide us throughout the world. Sixteen years ago, myself and two others … discovered this blue light-sensing light receptor called melanopsin.
These light-sensing cells in the retina — 5,000 of them per eye — are hardwired to many parts of the brain, including the master clock in the hypothalamus, and the pineal gland that makes … melatonin.
That discovery completely changed how we look at light. It’s not only lighting for safety or security. We have to now think about lighting for health … We [also] have to now think about blue light.
It’s not that we should get rid of blue light completely. We need more blue light during the daytime, and we need less at least three to four hours before going to bed.
The bottom line is in the last 100 to 150 years, we have cleared the man-made world without paying attention to circadian rhythms. Now we have the excellent opportunity to recreate and rebuild this entire world that will optimize our health.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa5q-hJRDCE