Tag Archives: circadian rhythm

Vitamin D, Fiat Lux, and Circadian Rhythms

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 23 comments

Vitamin D synthesis is TEAMWORK!

Skin: 7-dehydrocholesterol + UVB = previtamin D3.
Liver: Previtamin D3 –> 25(OH)-Vitamin D3.
Kidney: 25(OH)-Vitamin D3 –> 1,25(OH)2-Vitamin D3 if you need it or 24,25(OH)2-Vitamin D3 if you don’t.

N.B. one of the major regulatory pathways occurs in skin: if you’re getting a lot of sunlight, then skin darkens to block this step.  Supplemental and dietary Vitamin D3 bypass this… but the dietary Vitamin D supply rarely produces toxicity because it’s not very abundant.  In other words, sunlight Vitamin D never reaches toxic levels.  Supps could (rare, but possible).

Disclaimer: I’m not against Vit D supps, but prefer sunlight whenever possible.

The other major regulatory step is in the kidney.  Production of 1,25(OH)2-Vitamin D3 is tightly regulated — so blood levels don’t decline until your very deficient… so 25(OH)-Vitamin D3 is a better indicator of skin production and dietary intake.

Disclaimer #2: this post is not about any of the pleiotropic effects of Vitamin D or D supps, which range in value from worthless to helpful to possibly harmful.

 

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, diet, Sun, Vitamin D

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Ketone bodies as signaling metabolites

Posted on November 24, 2014 | 23 comments

*non sequiter*

One of the ways dietary carbohydrate contributes to liver fat is via ChREBP: “carbohydrate-response element binding protein.”  It responds to a glucose metabolite and activates transcription of lipogenic genes.  Insulin helps.  Ketones do the opposite (Nakagawa et al., 2013), by inhibiting the translocation of ChREBP into the nucleus where it does it’s dirty work:

 

ChREBP

 

More interestingly, ketones are histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi)… this leads to more histone acetylation.  Benefits of fasting sans fasting?  Modulating of acetylation is a MAJOR regulator of circadian rhythmicity.

Butyrate is another HDACi, so have some fibrous plant foods with your red wine and dark chocolate.  Anti-aging (mostly worm studies, but still).

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, chocolate, circadian, Dietary fat, fat, insulin, Ketosis, microbiome, wine

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Circadian Mismatch and Chronopharmacology

Posted on October 20, 2014 | 16 comments

Part I: Circadian Mismatch

1. Artificial light at night suppresses melatonin (Lewy et al., 1980); induces “circadian mismatch.”

2. Circadian mismatch is associated with and/or predisposes to breast cancer (eg, He et al., 2014 and Yang et al., 2014).

3. In this epic study, human breast cancer xenografts were exposed to blood taken from healthy, pre-menopausal women during the day (melatonin-depleted), at night (high melatonin), or at night after light exposure (melatonin-depleted) (Blask et al., 2005). They showed that tumors exposed to melatonin-depleted blood exhibited higher proliferative activity than those exposed to melatonin-repleted blood. This has been deemed one of the most “ethical” studies to demonstrate a causal link between circadian mismatch and cancer.

4. And to make matters worse, circadian mismatch also reduces the efficacy of cancer drug therapy (Dauchy et al., 2014).  This study showed that, in a rodent model of breast cancer, exposure to light at night (circadian mismatch) enhanced tumor development and induced tamoxifen-resistance, and this was abolished by melatonin replacement.

melatonin

They also suggested a mechanism: tumors metabolize linoleate into the mitogen 13-HODE.  Melatonin suppresses linoleate uptake.

linoleate 13-HODE

 

 

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

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Pharmaceutical-grade circadian enhancement?

Posted on October 6, 2014 | 31 comments

Is it possible to improve the amplitude and resiliency of your circadian rhythms?  Is this desirable?  Yes and yes, I think.

Go the fuck to sleep.png

 

Introducing, the aMUPA mice (Froy et al., 2006).  What you need to know about ’em: they have very robust circadian rhythms.  How is this assessed?  Take some mice acclimated to their normal 12 hour light-dark cycle (LD) and place them in constant darkness (DD).  Then take liver biopsies and measure circadian genes to see how well they still oscillate throughout the dark day; this is also known as the free-running clock, and it craps out differently in different tissues depending on a variety of factors.  Most of the time, however, it’ll run for a few days in the absence of light.  Circadian meal timing also helps to hasten re-entrainment.

 

 

Note in the figure below: 1) there are two distinct lines of aMUPA mice; and 2) both exhibit a greater amplitude in circadian oscillations during free-running, or DD conditions.

strong circadian rhythms

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, circadian, diet, Energy balance, insulin, muscle, sleep

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Evolution stole this dude’s circadian rhythm

Posted on September 29, 2014 | 12 comments

I got a laugh out of this one; not for the actual content, but because of how the authors worded their findings.  They sure love their fishies.

We have two very closely related fish, both Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, one with eyes who lives on the surface, and another who’s blind and lives in dark caves (“Pachon”).  It’s thought that they were the same species one day; divergent evolution.

 

note: eyeless

note: eyeless

The blind ones are circadian arrhythmic (Moran et al., 2014).  Surface-dwellers are more active during the day than night (blue line, left figure below), and their free-running circadian clock maintains this in the absence of photic input (blue line, right figure).  The blind ones, on the other hand, exhibit no circadian rhythm in the light or dark (orange lines):

 

Circadian rhythm metabolism

 

Cave-dwellers are circadian arrhythmic.  This is both in their natural photoperiod (ie, darkness) and in light-dark conditions (which is technically an environmental mismatch, but since they’re eyeless, it doesn’t really matter).

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Posted in circadian, Energy balance, fat, Fish, muscle

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“Afternoon diabetes” and nutrient partitioning

Posted on September 27, 2014 | 65 comments

Don’t exacerbate afternoon diabetes with afternoon carbs.

Skeletal Muscle
As discussed previously [at length], insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle follows a circadian pattern: starts out high in the morning and wanes throughout the day.

Diurnal variation in oral glucose tolerance: blood sugar and plasma insulin levels, morning, afternoon and evening (Jarrett et al., 1972)

impaired circadian glucose tolerance in the morning

Diurnal variation in glucose tolerance and insulin secretion in man (Carroll and Nestel, 1973)

Circadian variation of the blood glucose, plasma insulin and human growth hormone levels in response to an oral glucose load in normal subjects (Aparicio et al., 1974)

Adipose Tissue
And insulin sensitivity of adipose tissue goes in the opposite direction: starts out low, and increases as the day progresses.

Diurnal variations in peripheral insulin resistance and plasma NEFA: a possible link? (Morgan et al., 1999)
The studies were standardized for a period of fasting, pre-test meal, and exercise… Following insulin, NEFA fell more slowly in the morning (149 uM/15 min) than in the evening (491 uM/15 min).

Diurnal variation in glucose tolerance: associated changes in plasma insulin, growth hormone, and non-esterified fatty acids (Zimmet et al., 1974)
Adipose tissue insulin sensitivity is greater in the evening.  FFA are higher, and get shut down more rapidly, after a carb meal in the evening.

Summary: to minimize blood glucose excursions and proclivity for fat storage, eat more calories earlier in the day; this is circadian nutrient timing.  And according to the Alves study, a low-carb protein-rich dinner best preserves lean tissue during weight loss.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, clamp, diet, Energy balance, insulin, Ketosis, melatonin, Protein

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Circadian phase delays and metabolism

Posted on August 12, 2014 | 15 comments

Remember the “jet lag-resistant” mice?  Guess what: screw with circadian biology and metabolism pays the price.

In brief, vasopressin was classically thought of as an anti-hypotensive hormone.  The vasopressin analog Desmopressin is used to treat bed-wetting.  But vasopressin biology is much more interesting than that: mice lacking both vasopressin receptors require very little time adapting to large circadian phase changes.  And as with many fundamental concepts in chronobiology, this is intimately linked with metabolism.

People with certain polymorphisms of the vasopressin receptor, V1A, exhibit elevated blood glucose levels and are at greater risk for diabetes (Enhorning et al., 2009):

genotype

This risk is strongest in men in the highest quartile of fat intake, and is statistically more significant after adjusting for age and physical activity:

Fat consumption

This study wasn’t designed to be a very powerful indicator of diet-disease relationships, but a little speculation: some think higher fat [and lower carb] intake should be protective against diabetes… which may be true, for people who can tell time.  Alter one nucleotide in the vasopressin 1A receptor gene and the game changes.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, angiotensin, circadian, clamp, Dietary fat, Energy balance, insulin, liver, melatonin, muscle, vasopressin

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Carb Back-Loading, take II

Posted on July 28, 2014 | 53 comments

Brief refresher: skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity is higher in the morning than in the evening.  Exercise boosts insulin sensitivity selectively in muscle, which is relatively more important in the evening.  Thus, an evening carb-load may benefit from exercise to effectively partition the energy influx into skeletal muscle [and away from adipose tissue].

Summary of Part 1 of my CBL review: studies on nutrient timing sans exercise aren’t entirely consistent, in part, due to reciprocal regulation of insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle and adipose tissue.  That is, excess energy from an evening carb-load, without the exercise-induced, skeletal muscle-specific boost in insulin sensitivity, may be biased less toward muscle growth and more toward fat storage, because unlike skeletal muscle, the sensitivity of adipose tissue to insulin appears to improve as the day progresses… and without exercise to offset this, as in the studies discussed below, this may lead to suboptimal results.

*one thing Kiefer stressed, and I agree, is that the effects of any given intervention may be population-specific.  For example, he pointed out that diurnal insulin sensitivity is less robust in obese and aged populations.  So if two findings aren’t in full agreement, click the link to the study and check this first… context matters!

Tl;dr: I think high intensity exercise and possibly the time of day it’s performed, and regular bouts of fasting, are important factors that mediate the efficacy of CBL and similar protocols. Continue reading →

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, diet, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, insulin, muscle, Protein, strength, TPMC

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Carb Back-Loading and the Circadian Regulation of Metabolism

Posted on July 16, 2014 | 133 comments

Carb Back-Loading (CBL) redux, part I

Step 1: eat little in the morning (maybe some fat+protein; definitely no carb)
Step 2: exercise in the afternoon/evening
Step 3: eat the carbs, all of them.  Preferably high glycemic carbs.
Other: no dietary fat post-workout; protein periodically throughout the day.

What makes CBL different from its predecessors is the stress on the timing – exercise and carbs in the evening.  John Berardi’s “Massive Eating” dietary guidelines are similar: protein+fat meals all day except pre- and post-workout, which are protein+carb meals.  Martin Berkan’s “LeanGains” is fasting most of the time (including pre-workout), exercise in the afternoon, then a big post-workout meal (quite similar to CBL).  My only tweak, as discussed below (and previously here and here), would be a pre- rather than post-workout meal [in some contexts].

There’s a summary of this blog post at the bottom… it might be helpful to read that first (see: “Tl;dr:”).  Also, please note that much of this post is about the fringe of theoretically optimizing nutrient partitioning, like improving from 85 to 90%, or 40 to 45%, not 40 to 90%…  I’m not that deluded.

My initial take, in general, is that this book is loaded with gems about nutrition, exercise, biochemistry, and physiology.  It’s also very readable and has a lot of good recommendations.  In this post, I want to discuss one specific aspect of CBL: tissue-specific circadian regulation of metabolism.

 

nutrient timing

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, diet, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, insulin, melatonin, muscle, Protein, strength, TPMC

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Paleo Plants and Carnivory

Posted on July 7, 2014 | 126 comments

From what I gather, it’s been difficult to pinpoint the role of plants in the diet of our ancestors for a variety of reasons.  For example, evidence of plants on cooking tools and dental remains is suggestive but doesn’t disprove the possibility that said evidence came from preparing the plants for some other purpose (eg, tools, weapons, or medicine), or that the stomach contents of an herbivore was ingested (which gets partial credit).

That said, after reviewing a few studies on the topic (see below), it’s safe to say that plants were eaten, probably frequently, and the types & quantities varied seasonally & geographically.  Collectively, the data suggest we aren’t carnivores.

…you had to have something to hold you over until the next fish fell prey to your deadly hunting spear…

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, chocolate, circadian, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, Fish, Leptin, microbiome, microbiota, Sugar, TPMC

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