Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're exploring circadian rhythms.

Did you know that you could eat the exact same meal at two different times of day and your body would respond dramatically differently.

It sounds like a riddle,

but it actually comes down to your body clock.

Every cell in your body has one,

a tiny internal ticker shaped by evolution

over millions of years to keep you in sync

with the phases of the day.

So how can we ensure we're doing the right thing at the right

time? I'm joined by Professor Russell Foster to help us all stay in time with our natural rhythm.

Socadian rhythms, you know, the body clock, as it's called, what are they and why do they matter to us?

Let's start with why do they matter. If you think about

our biology, what it has to achieve is the right substances, at the right concentration,

delivered to the right tissues and organs at the right time of day. And it's the sort of temporal

time structure that is delivered by our circadian system, our body clocks,

that allow us to do this, that allow us to, essentially, optimize our biology.

So they're incredibly important. Essentially, they influence every aspect of our physiology

and behavior. What they are, has turned out to be really fascinating. We've sort of known

about rhythmicity for a very long period of time. The first sort of description of a circadian

rhythm goes back to about 1729 in plants with a rhythmic opening and closing of leaves under

constant conditions, under constant darkness. In fact, this French astronomer

...