Category Archives: chronopharmacology

Scheduled Meals for Circadian Entrainment

Posted on July 17, 2017 | Leave a comment

Scheduled Meals for Circadian Entrainment

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, sleep, Sun, vasopressin

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Light and food in the morning

Posted on May 31, 2017 | 6 comments

Suggested pre-reading: Metabolism at night

Recently, when the topic of breakfast came up, I got something like this: “correlation isn’t causation, and anyway, it’s because people aren’t eating bacon & eggs at night, they’re having cake & alcohol.”

OK, you can’t say “correlation isn’t causation” and then suggest a cause, literally, in the same sentence.

But anyway, yeah, that actually is a plausible cause. Cake & alcohol are mainly consumed at night.

Also, metabolism is gimped in the evening: 1) skeletal muscle insulin resistance; 2) adipose tissue insulin sensitivity; and 3) impaired diet-induced thermogenesis.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, diet, Dopamine, Energy balance, melatonin, muscle, Protein, sex, sleep, strength, Sun, vasopressin, Vitamin D

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Carb early but not often

Posted on March 17, 2017 | 11 comments

*if you’re going to carb, that is

 

 

The Sofer study was uniquely insightful in that they compared 3 carb-rich meals per day with the same amount of carbs but restricted to 1 meal.  Both groups ate 3 times per day.  Tl;dr: one carb meal is modestly better than three even when total carbs are controlled.  Since the carb-meal happened to be dinner, #fakenews reported that “carbs at night” are superior… but we saw right through that – the real conclusion was carb frequency not carb timing.

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, diet, Dietary fat, Dopamine, fertility, melatonin, Protein, sex, sleep, Sun, Vitamin D

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What or When to Eat

Posted on March 11, 2017 | 13 comments

Artificial light at night, crappy sleep, and skipping breakfast are major contributors to poor circadian rhythms.  Some bro’s insist WHAT you eat is infinitely more important than WHEN you eat.  I beg to differ, at least in part – nix the refined & processed foods and it doesn’t really matter if you prefer low fat or low carb (P<0.05).  Evidence: Hunger-free diet(s).

 

Exhibit A.  On the other hand, feed two people identical diets but induce circadian disruption in one and whammo – big difference in outcome.

 

 

Significantly less fat loss and more muscle loss in the circadian disrupted group.

Interindividual variability? Yes.  Statistical significance? YES.

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, diet, Dopamine, Energy balance, fertility, insulin, Ketosis, Leptin, melatonin, sleep, Sun, vasopressin, Vitamin D

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Another great camping experiment

Posted on February 20, 2017 | 5 comments

In the original Incredible camping experiment, a week-long camping trip was shown to cause people to fall sleep & wake earlier, feel better, and advanced their melatonin secretion.  In the new Camping Experiment, they showed that 70% of this is accomplished within the first 2 days!

 

Some of the #FakeNews headlines attributed the improved sleep quality to sleeping in a tent.  “Cute.”  More likely, this was driven by absence of artificial light.

Proposal: How about fasting from artificial light one day per week?  Or maybe just one night per week?

 

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Posted in angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, melatonin, sleep, Sun

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Metabolism at night

Posted on February 13, 2017 | 12 comments

From circadian entrainment to blood glucose management to appetite control to sleep quality:

 

 

We’re really not made to skip breakfast and eat late at night.  Nearly every line of evidence points to this.  And now:

Is the timing of caloric intake associated with variation in diet-induced thermogenesis and in the metabolic pattern? A randomized cross-over study (Bo et al., 2015)

 

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Posted in angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, muscle, Sun, Uncategorized, Vitamin D

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Specific Absorption Rate

Posted on January 14, 2017 | 4 comments

 

I was bored and had a stronger-than-usual espresso, saw the above Tweet, so obviously I decided to read the Health & Safety Guide that came with my cell phone.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set specific limits to Radio Frequency (RF) that any given electronic device can emit.  Theoretically, at or below this level is “safe.”  The actual number comes from the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The overall tone of this document is grave, ie, they take this RF limit very seriously.

 

The limit: 1.6 W/kg (Specific Absorption Rate [SAR]) or 0.0016 W/g.

 

I checked online at www.fcc.gov/oet/ea, and my phone is rated 0.3 Watts (W) at around 1.5 cm – distance is important: in this case, it’s the difference between squashing the phone between your face and your hand vs. holding it a finger tip’s distance away.

 

So, is my brain safe?  Hard to say; how many grams of brain are within 1.5 cm from my brain? If we’re talking whole head exposure, ~4 kg, that’d be ~6 W.  But I’m more concerned about the 4 grams of brain closest to my ear, within that 1.5 cm range, because brain cancer is pretty scary at any level of brain cancer (ie, whether it affects whole brain or just the 4 grams closest to my ear).

I can’t figure out these maths so I’m sticking with earbuds until I can.

 

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Posted in chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, melatonin, sex, Sun

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MELATONIN

Posted on January 2, 2017 | 8 comments

There are a lot of mysteries involving melatonin, eg, relative importance of gut vs. pineal-derived melatonin.  Does brain melatonin talk to peripheral MT receptors?  Does gut melatonin talk to brain MT receptors?

What we do know: oral melatonin works in people with circadian-related sleep disorders.  This may suggest that oral/gut melatonin talks to brain MT receptors OR that oral/gut melatonin corrects circadian sleep problems by acting in the periphery.  OR a major target of brain melatonin is peripheral MT receptors.  I don’t know.

And as a further testament that melatonin supps aren’t sleeping pills is that they’re non-addictive and can at least temporarily “fix” circadian sleep problems: after prolonged treatment, people report no withdrawal symptoms and still sleep better even up to two weeks after discontinuation (Lemoine et al., 2011)!

 

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Posted in angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, melatonin, Sun, vasopressin, Vitamin D

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LIGHT is a drug

Posted on December 14, 2016 | 13 comments

Three stories about LIGHT

One

Carbon monoxide (CO): one of the nasty things in car emissions & cigarette smoke.  Also, a byproduct of the ever-important heme.  Heme, as you may recall, activates Rev-erb:

 

“Food for thought: an endogenous ligand of Rev-erb is heme (the iron-binding element in red blood cells).  Heme is degraded into bilirubin.  Elevated levels of bilirubin cause jaundice.  A treatment of neonatal jaundice is exposure to blue light.  Blue light is a major regulator of circadian rhythms and Rev-erb is an executive-level player in this game.  The primary mechanisms of blue light appear unrelated in these two models (melanopsin activation vs. bilirubin photoisomerization), but seem intertwined, because heme activates Rev-erb.  Cool.”

 

News: Disruption of the body’s internal clock causes disruption of metabolic processes

Science: Reciprocal regulation of carbon monoxide and the circadian clock (Klemz et al., 2016)

Tl;dr: heme degradation occurs on a circadian cycle and produces CO.  CO prevents Clock/Bmal1 from binding to DNA. Inhibiting this process throws off numerous other circadian rhythms in the liver.

SUNLIGHT and food in the morning, and let endogenously produced CO rhythmically tune the clock in the evening.

 

 

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Posted in angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, melatonin, Protein, sleep, Sun, vasopressin

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If meat causes cancer…

Posted on December 1, 2016 | 6 comments

Disclaimer: I’m meat-cancer agnostic.  *IF* meat causes cancer (and I don’t think it does), it happens extremely slowly and only at very high levels of intake: to get statistically significant risk ratios, researchers usually look to top vs. bottom quartiles, which is quite a large difference in intake.

Meat-cancer studies Tl;dr: some studies show positive associations, some neutral, and none are negative (ie, it’s unlikely meat prevents cancer).

That said, if meat does cause cancer, here is how it might happen:

1. The “Maybes:” AGEs, leucine/mTOR, methionine, etc., but only in combination with numbers 2 & 3.  Not by themselves.

2. Circadian arrhythmia and cancer: potential mechanisms

3. Most animal foods have a lot of linoleate 18:2n6 or at least a lot more n6 than n3 (grass-fed is usually a little better in this context).  More on this below.

 

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Posted in angiotensin, Bromocriptine, Cabergoline, chronopharmacology, circadian, Dopamine, melatonin, mortality, muscle, Protein, sleep, Sun

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