Satchidananda Panda Summary

When mice on a high fat diet were limited to eating for 8 hours each day, they ate just as much as mice who ate 24 hours a day, but they were protected from obesity along with other metabolic problems. The finding shows that the health effects of a bad diet may result in part from a mismatch between our body clocks and our eating schedules.

“Every organ has a clock,” said lead author of the study Satchidananda Panda. That means there are times that our livers, intestines, muscles, and other organs will work at peak efficiency and other times when they are more or less sleeping.

Those metabolic cycles are critical for processes from cholesterol breakdown to glucose production, and they should be primed to turn on when we eat and back off when we don’t, or vice versa. When mice or people eat frequently throughout the day and night, it can throw off those normal metabolic cycles.

The principle is just like it is with sleep and waking, he explained. If we don’t sleep well at night, we aren’t completely awake during the day, and we work less efficiently as a consequence.

To find out whether restricted feeding alone, without a change in calorie intake, could prevent metabolic disease, Panda’s team fed mice either a standard or high-fat diet with one of two types of food access: ad lib feeding or restricted access.

The time-restricted mice on a high-fat diet were protected from the adverse effects of a high-fat diet and showed improvements in their metabolic and physiological rhythms. They gained less weight and suffered less liver damage. The mice also had lower levels of inflammation, among other benefits.

Panda says there is reason to think our eating patterns have changed in recent years, as many people have greater access to food and reasons to stay up into the night, even if just to watch TV. And when people are awake, they tend to