Maybe it’s not what you eat, but when you eat it

Check out this experiment:

At California’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researchers took a group of mice and fed them fatty foods.

Dr. Amir Zarrinpar said that one group of mice was allowed to eat anytime they wanted. The test group was allowed to eat only at night, which is when their body clocks are naturally awake, since mice are nocturnal.

“What we noticed was, even though they were eating the same amount of high-fat diet, they ended up not becoming obese at all.”

The timing made a huge difference.

The nighttime eaters ate the same amount of fatty food, but didn’t get fat. Because mice are nocturnal, their body clock sent a signal that food eaten at night should be burned instead of stored as fat.

So does that mean that we humans would be better off eating during the hours we’re normally active and resist eating big evening meals, for example, when our body clock is winding down?

Sadly, the research hasn’t gone that far.

“I think that we don’t really understand metabolism at that level yet. Maybe in mice, but not in humans,” Zarrinpar said.

So the next step is to design a human experiment.
Because if you could manipulate the body clock to discourage fat storage, we could all look like figure skaters without effort.

When I asked how long that might take, “What’s awesome about our job is that things are so interesting and so rapidly moving that it’s really hard to predict,” Zarrinpar said.

I think that means we’re stuck with the treadmill.