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| Eating time is important too! |
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
LONDON: When you eat may be just as vital to your wellbeing as what you eat, says an Indian-American researcher. Experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver—the body’s metabolic clearinghouse—is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom believes.
”If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism,” says Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, assistant professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
The Salk researchers’ findings could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity. ”We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle,” says Panda, who did his BSc from Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology, India.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
