Ladies and gentlemen of the podcast, I'm Beck. Welcome to another episode. I'm very excited

about this one because it features a scientist whose work I have admired for quite some time.

We bring to you today Dr. Sachin Panda, a professor at the Solc Institute for Biological Studies

in La Jolla, California, an institute where I actually worked and got my first taste of aging

research early in my career just before the start of graduate school. Needless to say, a great place.

Sachin's work, which we talk a bit about today, deals specifically with the timing of food and its

relationship to our biological clocks, governed by circadian rhythm. These clocks regulate

thousands of genes, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of around 10 to 15 percent of the

expressed human genome, which means that our physiology, and indeed our metabolism,

is all meant to be tuned to behave differently depending on the time of day that it is.

But what happens if it has no idea what that time of day is? Bad things, that's what.

The good news is, however, that Dr. Panda's research and that of his colleagues has suggested a

pretty straightforward solution that seems to show a lot of merit, and that is time restricted feeding.

By restricting mice to a 12-hour window in which they eat, starting at the first bite of food,

but otherwise allowing them to eat the same amount of calories, they have shown that they can attain

some pretty amazing benefits, including decreased fat mass, increased lean muscle mass, improved glucose

tolerance, improved lipid profiles, reduced inflammation, higher mitochondrial volume,

protection from mild age-related fatty liver, increased production of ketone bodies,

protection from obesity, and generally a favorable improvements in gene expression.

Some of these benefits are context dependent. For example, some of the largest improvements are

seen in mice that are actually fed in obesity-genic diet, or what is often called a high fat diet for

short, but is actually a 60% large high sugar diet that is the laboratory standard for causing type

...