19. Chrononutrition: How Your Diet Influences Your Circadian Rhythm

Join our host, Krys Araujo Torres, as she sits down with Professor Leonidas Karagounis to discuss Chrononutrition. This episode explores how the timings and nutritional value of meals can affect your circadian rhythms and sleep-wake cycle. From the fragile link between sleep and other daily activities, to personal circadian rhythm management, Professor Leonidas Karagounis takes us through the benefits and drawbacks of certain diet regimes and busts some common sleep myths. Tune in to our enlightening discussion to discover the details of chrono-nutrition and how you can optimize your own rhythms to make the most of your waking hours.  

This podcast is sponsored by Nestlé Health Science. This podcast represents the opinions of host Krys Araujo Torres and her guest on the show and does not reflect the opinion of Nestlé Health Science. Professor Leonidas Karagounis is an expert in nutrition, integrative physiology, and metabolic health. The content is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice. Please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. 

Transcript

Nutrition Unlocked // EP019 - Chrono-nutrition and health 

[00:00:00] Jackie: Welcome to the latest episode of Nutrition Unlocked, the podcast celebrating innovations, advancing the role of nutrition in health, sponsored by Nestle Health Science. 

[00:00:09] Leon: Coming up, we're joined by Dr. Leon Karagounis to learn about circadian rhythms and chrononutrition. Health is an accumulation of lifestyle behaviors across your life course. And the ability that our body has to adapt to changes is reduced with time as we age. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. There is a lot of truth to that. 

[00:00:29] We can cope with a lack of sleep. We will not thrive with a lack of sleep. 

[00:00:34] Jackie: Our host is Dr. Krys Araujo Torres, Head of Medical Affairs for Nestle Health Science in the U. S. 

[00:00:40] Stay tuned.

// Main Chat //

[00:00:43] Leon: Welcome back to Nutrition Unlocked. I'm Krys Araujo Torres. Today we have a very interesting and relevant topic and guest. We'll be talking to Professor Leonidas Karagounis about chrononutrition. Professor Karagounis is an expert in nutrition, integrative physiology and metabolic health. He currently serves as professor of research translation and enterprise at the Australian Catholic University. He has extensive experience in both academia and industry. And full disclosure, I know Leon from his days at Nestle Research. His research focuses on chrono-nutrition, aging and physical activity, making him a leading voice in the field of circadian rhythms and health. Welcome, Leon. Thank you, Kyrs. Nice to see you.

[00:01:27] Krys: Same here! Let's talk about chrononutrition. I am super interested in this topic. This is not my field. I know a little bit about circadian rhythms, but can you explain to our audience what a circadian rhythm is and how it differs from chrononutrition? Why is it an important thing to consider for overall health?

[00:01:48] Leon: Chrononutrition is the timing of eating around your circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is the internal clock our system has, and it helps control our physiological processes. So this is actually just briefly regulated by what we call the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain. And I just basically describe that as the conductor of an orchestra. 

[00:02:06] So the circadian rhythm is all the players in the orchestra and we have those players in all our cells and it's regulated primarily by sun exposure, food and exercise.

[00:02:16] Krys: All of those elements, food, exercise and sun exposure in a way control or have an impact in our physiological processes. Am I understanding that correctly?

[00:02:28] Leon: Yes, absolutely. That's exactly it. And for instance, the sun activates what we call suprachiasmatic nucleus, through shooting photons through your eye basically. It hits the retinal cells and then that triggers these responses in the brain, which then triggers the cascade across the body. So we know that there's different processes that occur at different times of the day.

[00:02:50] And then if you don't have that sun exposure, you may actually negatively impact that circadian rhythm. So you're basically desynchronizing that orchestra, all the players. So instead of getting a nice symphony, you're getting a cacophony of music or of cell signals.

[00:03:04] Krys: I love that metaphor. So getting from your explanation that, okay, one of the things that can be disruptive isrelated to sleep or the time that we sleep. But what are other main disruptors in our circadian rhythm?

[00:03:18] Leon: It's a bit of a chicken or the egg situation, because some of the disruptors can disrupt your circadian rhythm, which can then cause further disruptors down the line. And then it's just an endless circle of feeding that broken system. 

[00:03:30] So for instance, we have things like light exposure at the wrong time, artificial light at night, we know impact sleep quality. And if you don't sleep properly, then you can't reset your circadian rhythm and your circadian clock. So then you wake up in the morning and you're not actually resetting that clock. So you're now almost in this constant jet lag situation or social jet lag, as we call it. Shift workers experience this a lot and regular sleep schedules.

[00:03:54] Like I said, we have the social jet lag, which I'm not sure if you're aware of that term, but if you imagine you travel on an airplane and you travel five time zones, or even if you travel two time zones, it pretty much takes a day per time zone that you travel to recover, to get that circadian rhythm back again.

[00:04:10] Now, what we do in our societal living that we do, we have work programs, we deal with children, schools and all the rest. So we tend to wake up very early in the morning. I've seen a lot of training programs now for children are going on until 10 o'clock at night. So parents are working throughout the day and then that sleep deprivation they get, they end up trying to sleep it off over the weekend, or people go out Friday night, Saturday night, spend a very long night out. But in actual fact, what you're doing is you're jet lagging yourself by the amount of hours you're going beyond your typical rhythm. And that's what we call the social jet lag system. 

[00:04:44] So you can imagine that can impact your health, in terms of shifting the circadian rhythmicity, but you can sense it very easily and quickly in the time it takes you to recover from late nights.

[00:04:55] So then you come back to Monday morning, wake up early again, and then you're just perpetuating that cycle. There where people travel, for instance, they'll travel several times a year or once every so often, with social jet lag, it's compounding and it's happening continuously.

[00:05:09] Krys: I also feel that as I've grown in age, I have less ability to recover from any sleep disruption or traveling. Even so, I guess everything is a little bit connected or a lot connected.

[00:05:24] Leon: Very much so. The way I like to look at health, and this is a question which always comes, is it good for our health, and how does our health impact these behaviors? Our ability to adapt to more stress, or to fatigue, or to exercise, or to lack of sleep? 

[00:05:39] Health is is an accumulation of lifestyle behaviors across your life course. And the plasticity we have, in other words, the ability that our body has to adapt to changes and insults, is reduced with time as we age. We don't have that capacity to deal with those perturbations in the system anymore. 

[00:05:55] The other thing is that accumulation of lifestyle behaviors, so if you have a lifestyle of late nights, late nights, late nights, eventually, those will catch up with you. 

[00:06:03] 

[00:06:03] So your ability to adapt, for instance, maybe just the case of everything is catching up as different stages of our lives, we go through these things and that is where we have that inability then to cope with all these stresses. And the more you do it, some people think, oh, the more I travel, the more I get used to it. This is true, but then it's having a breakdown in the system somewhere else.

[00:06:23] Krys: And you mentioned consequences in terms of overall health, which are some of those consequences?

[00:06:30] Leon: Yeah, so, we have to be careful with scientific work, scientific literature. We have, what we call cause and effect. So interventions where we change something in the trial, and then we see what impact that has. But typically those studies are performed in very small population numbers. So 20, 30, 50, a hundred people even. 

[00:06:48] Then you have the observational studies. Now observational studies can be performed in hundreds of people, thousands of people in fact. And there are some studies that have shown that shift workers, these are observational longitudinal studies, as we call them.There's an observation that people who work night shifts tend to have higher incidence of cancers, certain cancers.

[00:07:07] Now, a lot of that work has been attributed back to the circadian rhythm. It's looking how this constant disruption of the rhythm can cause perturbations in the system. So your genes aren't responding as they should. A lot of the stimuli are there impacting the circadian rhythm in a negative way. So it's a matter of deciphering those points.

[00:07:26] But what is really interesting and a very exciting field coming up in the forefront more and more is we're now seeing that certain surgeries and even organ transplantations are being impacted by the time of day they might be removed from the donor or implanted into the patient.

[00:07:42] So this is now the circadian rhythms are really playing a role in being looked at in this field, which I find very exciting.

[00:07:50] Krys: Totally agree. I'm a little bit mind blown.Okay, let's take it back to chrononutrition, which I'm really interested in getting out of this conversation, something that people can do because I understand that there is an ability, for us, for example, related to sleep to get in somebetter habits. Same with exercise,for shift :work, it really depends on your field of work and I hope that people can cope and manage some of those situations, but food intake is something that we probably have a lot of control. So I'm really interested in the field of chrono-nutrition and what can we do, what can we do well?

[00:08:28] Leon: The one caveat here is that we're not all the same. We all have a circadian rhythm. Most organisms have these circadian rhythms and what we can do is we can take. the learnings and apply them to individuals. 

[00:08:39] So if we just look at chrononutrition and we start saying, okay, how do you eat in a day? And we have that whole 24 hour window. There are certain givens. We know now, and the research is evolving quite a bit. We've done research from children through to adults showing how, depending on what you have for breakfast, for instance, it can impact certain mechanisms in your system. So we know that during the nighttime, it's a repair process that takes place.

[00:09:03] We've performed research where we've taken muscle samples every four hours for a 24 hour duration. And when you look at all the gene expression, these are the regulators in the muscle, for instance, that make things happen. You have repair processes, the immune responses that occur in the muscle. That doesn't happen in a consistent, 24 hour process. There are certain peaks and troughs in the expression of those genes. So at some points they're waking up, then they're going to sleep, then they're coming back to work and going back to sleep. And what we found is that around four o'clock in the morning, we have a peak in this gene activation that's involved in immune responses and inflammatory responses.

[00:09:41] So if you interrupt that process, potentially, if you've been exercising, for instance, maybe your muscle won't recover as well. And further down the line, slowly, slowly, you might find you start becoming more prone to injury. So understanding, for instance, that maybe it's not the best time to eat late at night because you're potentially impacting the repair process in your system, because your body's not doing what it should be doing. It's digesting food instead of repairing other mechanisms. 

[00:10:06] The other thing is the breakfast occasion. There's a bit of a misunderstanding around how breakfast came to be an important meal. There's a big history around the breakfast. The ancient Greeks and Romans, they were advocating three meals a day. It was middle ages, around there, when we then started changing our food behaviours. But we know from research we've done in children, that if they don't eat breakfast and they don't have a certain amount of protein for breakfast, then their lean tissue, so that's the non fat mass, is not being replenished as it should be.

[00:10:37] Whereas if they do have the protein, small amounts of protein, seven grams or so, just an egg, then you start getting this recovery in the losses that they've made overnight.

[00:10:46] Krys: You mentioned research in children. We talked a little bit about adults. Does chrononutrition affect us the same at every age or does it have larger effects at different age stages?

[00:11:00] Leon: That's a very good question. I don't have a clear answer for that. What we do know is that chronotypes, and this is the type of individual you are, and this is a lot of the time genetically predisposed to that, so you can be what we call a night owl or a morning lark. So that in itself can then start dictating what kind of eating patterns you may have to benefit your well being and what exercising patterns. 

[00:11:24] Now, we know that there's a certain amount of sleep we need. Eight hours is give or take the optimal. Eating late at night doesn't seem to be good for anyone. So we know that how you distribute your food through the day can impact whether you put on weight or not.

[00:11:37] So I think there was a, one of beautiful study out of Harvard recently showed that distributing and having a late meal, in the same individuals that had an earlier meal, so just eating up until bedtime, these individuals put on more weight for eating the same amount of food. So we do know that how you eat and how late in the night you eat before you go to bed can impact everyone pretty much, well being in terms of storing more fat than you would do if you ate earlier on.

[00:12:04] Krys: And when we say late, those research of what time was late versus earlier?

[00:12:09] Leon: It depends, how close is it to your bedtime, to your habitual bedtime? We know that 7, 8 o'clock, certain genes, you have your melatonin, if the sun is going down, your melatonin secretion increases. And that is the signal. And like I said before, right at the beginning, when we look at circadian rhythms in the sunlight, once the sunlight drops and we don't have the natural light, that's where the body signals itself to start shutting down and activating these other processes that occur during downtime, as we call it.

[00:12:37] So if you end up eating very close to that window, you start confusing the system. In a very simple way, that's one way of explaining it. And this is then how the whole process of, or the idea of the intermittent fasting or the time restricted eating comes in. It's how much time, how much downtime do you give your system in order for it to have a downtime, to repair its processes. And so it doesn't work continuously throughout this circadian rhythm.

*** Time-Restricted Eating/Intermittent Fasting

[00:13:10] Krys: Okay. So explain to us what is time restricted eating or intermittent fasting? Are those even the same?

[00:13:17] Leon: No, people confuse them sometimes,they're very similar though. 

[00:13:20] Intermittent fasting is a strategy where your eating patterns are scheduled to accommodate specified and sometimes extended periods in the fasted state, and often therefore indirectly reducing total energy intake. 

[00:13:32] Time restricted eating is a specific, what I would call subcategory of intermittent fasting, where you basically say, I'm not going to eat between these hours and those hours. So , you build an extended window of downtime in the system. For instance, typically we go from 12 to 14 hour opportunity to eat food and you reduce that down to between 8 and 10 hours. So in a 24 hour window, the time restricted eating, you basically say, I won't eat food between these times, or I will only eat food between these times. Whereas intermittent fasting is you can go for periods with or without food, but you don't restrict it on the time of day that you give your body that rest, that downtime.

[00:14:12] Krys: Understood. You say, okay, I'm going to eat eight hours. Does it need to be every day, the same eight hours? Okay.

[00:14:18] Leon: So yes, what we tend to do with the time restricted eating, you say I will eat between midday and four o'clock or six o'clock in the afternoon stroke evening. The good thing is to get that regularity to your meal pattern.

[00:14:31] The lack of regularity is what causes a lot of disturbances to the circadian rhythm in your system. Now, strictly speaking, intermittent fasting and time restricted eating are not circadian rhythm driven. There is research coming out all the time seeing how this marries, how the two concepts of the circadian rhythm and the chrononutrition fit together.

[00:14:53] Intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, although you're eating to specific times, we don't know truly if the benefits are circadian driven or not. Or is it just a case of you giving your vital organs the time to some downtime, so your pancreas doesn't have to keep secreting all the hormones it secretesand therefore you just give the digestive system, that whole digestive food system, the downtime it needs throughout the day.

[00:15:17] Krys: Okay. Soyou can do both intermittent fasting or time restricted eating within any dietary pattern or is there research showing, I don't know, something that is more protein forward orvegetarian? 

[00:15:33] Leon: Yeah. The way I like to see these modes, it's a diet. A diet is how you just simply, I'm not saying a calorie restriction or anything, it's just a diet is just how you consume your food.We did a systematic review a couple of years ago where we compared intermittent fasting, time restricted eating and normal calorie restriction in terms of weight loss. And what our research showed is that they're all as equally beneficial as each other. 

[00:15:56] This is a tool. And not everyone knows how to use the same tool and the right tool is not the right tool for everyone. 

[00:16:03] Choose the tool that suits you and if you're trying to lose weight, they tend to all work pretty much the same.

[00:16:09] There are some changes that we've started observing now when you start looking at glucose handling, so type two diabetes, insulin resistance, and we do know that time restricted eating does seem to have some beneficial effects on those end points. So managing your blood glucose. 

[00:16:24] And we believe,from the research that we've done, it does impact the circadian rhythm, but it's also giving your body that downtime, that switch off time.

[00:16:33] Krys: Who can people work with to understand what is the best pattern that serves them? What I'm getting out of this conversation is, for example, for children, breakfast is It's very important.As we grow in adulthood and we grow older, we start having all these metabolic issues appear and I can see how you could benefit from implementing some of thesechanges and really giving your body downtime and getting all these physiologic processesin better shape or under control, I'm going to call it. Who do we work with to understand how can we implement some of these changes?

[00:17:14] Leon: There are a lot of nutritionists, dietitians out there now paying a lot of attention to this. What we have to be careful is that one size does not fit all. So you can't turn around and say, yes, of course we all have a circadian rhythm, but you have genetic factors that impact how you wake up in the morning, how you go to bed at night.

[00:17:33] I know people who get up at 4:30 in the morning and go for a long bike ride before work, before they have anything to eat. Not everyone can do that. What we need to do is we need to find what suits us. 

[00:17:45] Now, there's the old adage that says, eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. There is a lot of truth to that. The problem is that we have to see how we can fit that in our social life and the social interactions we have with people with our working obligations. So what we don't want to be doing is putting pressure on people to feel that they have to adhere to these principles. But little changes can then have big impact down the line. 

[00:18:10] So people can reach out to dietitians, like I said, some doctors, some general practitioners, physicians are getting on board with this whole principle of circadian rhythm and timed eating the chronic nutrition concept, but there are a lot of myths out there. People say many different things. So be careful what you read, but I think a dietitian would be the first step

[00:18:30] Krys: That sounds wonderful. I'm getting from our conversation, this is really an opportunityto use some of these tools, but in a very personalized ways and it has to do not only with the work that you do,your family, your overall lifestyle.so really have to make it work and working with someone like a nutritionist really could be of help. 

** Myth-Busting 

[00:18:57] Krys: You talked about myths. let's dive into this. I'm one to go on social media. And one of the things that I've seen is like five easy tips to reset your circadian rhythm.

[00:19:08] Is that true? Is there anything that is five tips easy?

[00:19:11] Leon: Easy is relative. There are some things we can do to reset our circadian rhythm. We can look at sleep. Maintain sleep. Optimize light exposure. Definitely. When I travel, the first thing I do, especially if I'm traveling a long distance and many time zones, the first thing I do when I touch down in that new place is I go out and I go for a run. That gives me exposure to the sun, typically, it also tells my body, this is your wake time, unless of course I'm arriving in a place and it's straight to bed. I try and adhere to that. I won't have the meal, I'll just go to bed. So you're trying to train the system to that new time zone you're in.You have to then stick to a consistent schedule.

[00:19:49] If you're shifting your schedule all the time and you're having late nights, early nights and inconsistent sleep patterns that can mess your circadian rhythm up. So maintaining that can help then reset it. Staying active, like I said. Time your meals right. Try and eat, again, it's the regularity that our system likes. 

[00:20:07] And that's what the circadian rhythm does. It really preempts us for what's coming. Now, it doesn't mean if you don't adhere to the rhythm that you will become unhealthy. It's that long term effect of misalignment that we know now is causing these issues. Once or twice or here and there. It's not a deal breaker. We've adapted. We've worked very well as human beings. 

[00:20:27] And then the other thing is creating a sleep environment. That's a very important one. A lot of people say they can't get to sleep. There are certain temperatures that we sleep very well at, for instance, between 16 and 19 degrees celsius. That's an optimal environment for sleeping. And in fact, we know that in the morning when your body temperature rises, we wake up. That's how our body signals us to wake up. So getting the sleep. But if we stress about all these things too much, that can then cause problems on the sleep and therefore your circadian rhythm misaligns again. So let's not stress about it. It's not a make or break. People do have the behaviors. We do what we can and we can reset our circadian clock.

[00:21:05] Krys: Do our circadian rhythms stay the same over time?

[00:21:09] Leon: The circadian rhythms tend to stay the same over time, but the chronotype can change slightly with age. So we know infants, they don't actually truly have a chronotype at that age. Then as the children grow up, they start becoming the morning larks, they wake up early. Through adolescence, we then shift normally, we typically shift to a late, night owl as we call it, a late chronotype. But then typically around the age of 50, we start getting more of that morning chronotype. We tend to wake up earlier,we see that we require less sleep as such. Our body doesn't sleep as much. Those are the observations again from the observational research out there.

[00:21:45] Krys: And is it true that our bodies get used to a lack of sleep? 

[00:21:49] Leon: No. We can cope with a lack of sleep. We will not thrive with a lack of sleep. We definitely need the sleep and people say well, I can manage Monday to Friday and then I'll catch up over the weekend on my sleep. It's the quality, not the quantity of the sleep.

[00:22:05] That is what we're after.

[00:22:06] Krys: And the regularity. 

[00:22:08] Leon: And the regularity, exactly. Exactly. And when you get that regularity, you start getting the quality of sleep coming through. But, that's one of the myths. We can't get used to not having sleep.

[00:22:17] We can survive or we won't thrive.

** Circadian Rhythm and Gut & Liver Health 

[00:22:25] Krys: Let's shift a little bit our conversation to gut and liver and our circadian rhythm. How are they connected?

[00:22:33] Leon: So. The gut, obviously we have these microbes, we call it the gut microbiome. Now, the gut microbiome is a very dynamic environment. The way you eat, the way you sleep is going to impact your digestion. Your digestion is gonna impact the microbes, the microbial environment andthe microbes also affect the system in the other way. It can affect your digestion and your nutrient absorption. 

[00:22:53] So it, there is a bit of a, indirect connection there between the microbe, the microbial, the microbiome, the gut microbiome. So for instance, microbial composition fluctuates, the abundance of certain bacterial species changes. We know that it changes throughout the day. And those changes are brought about by the alignment with the feeding and fasting periods you have. We know metabolic activity shifts, because the gut microbiome also produces metabolites, secondary products from the food you eat, which can be beneficial or harmful.

[00:23:22] So if you're eating at the wrong time and then there's microbes are producing something which your body can't utilize at that time or might not be the right thing for it, that can also impact your metabolism through those processes. So you've got the microbiome and the gut being impacted by your behaviors, which then impact the circadian rhythm.

[00:23:40] The liver is a slightly different one. The liver is the main organ that processes the food. So when you absorb the food into the bloodstream, the first pass organ is the liver. And there was some really interesting research conducted a couple of years ago, where these scientists transplanted human liver cells into a rodent liver. So, you now have human cells growing. in a mouse liver. And what they found is that the muscle in those mice, took on a circadian rhythm, a bit more characteristic of that of a human. So in case you're not aware, mice and rodents don't have the same circadian rhythm as us. They're nocturnal animals. And what they found in this study is that when they changed the liver, partly to this human liver, you then started having more of a human circadian rhythm or the circadian rhythm was shifted forwards a little bit in these animals. 

[00:24:28] So it's really highlighting the importance of the liver on regulating circadian rhythm in peripheral tissues, in other tissues. So if you have what I said before, the suprachiasmatic nucleus being the chief conductor. The liver acts as a secondary system, which then communicates. So it helps regulate the system from a different perspective. 

[00:24:48] Krys: You mentioned, okay, the impact that time of eating can have on our gut and microbiome. But what about the types of food? 

[00:24:56] Leon: So eating foods that are high in fiber, that can really impact the microbiome environment. Now we're moving into gut microbiome and microbiome biology, but really that's what we see when you start having a lot offibrous foods, you start getting a very rich gut microbiome, which can then, this is now affecting the secondary metabolites and then how these microbes communicate within the gut to then trigger different systems. Appetite can be impacted. You get these other chemicals that are produced by the microbes, which are then released into the system and they can help with insulin resistance prevention and increase your metabolism overall.

[00:25:32] Of course, they can have negative impacts as well. If you eat the wrong things, a lot of simple sugars, processed products, things like that, ultra processed... it just depends then on what macro nutrients are being put into the system.

** Personalization & Holistic Wellbeing

[00:25:50] Krys: Perfect. I want us to end the conversation talking a little bit about personalizationand holistic wellbeing. You mentioned chronotypes.How do we understand chronotypes with factors related to age or gender or lifestyle? Are there different chronotypes?

[00:26:10] Leon: You can assess your chronotype by what we call is the dim light melatonin onset. So you just see. You need to take a blood test or you take a urine sample and measure your melatonin in those. There are questionnaires like the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire, which is a more amenable and you can do those assessments to find out what chronotype you are.

[00:26:28] Now, once you find your chronotype, you can take action and say, well, okay, I am therefore more of an evening person versus the morning person, but we have to understand that we are living in a society and it's how we balance whatever societal obligations we have with these circadian rhythms. People feel a lot of pressure all the time to do that, but we can fix those things. We can say, okay, if I'm a late chronotype, maybe I can do my exercise in the evening or I can do it in the morning. If I'm a morning chronotype, we find that if these individuals train in the evening and go and exercise in the evening, they actually misalign their circadian rhythm. So understanding your chronotype is quite an important factor in defining what kind of exercise program or when you should exercise, when the best time to exercise is or when to eat and how to eat.

[00:27:15] Krys: So interesting. I don't think I had an appreciation of how you could really test your chronotype. I do think a lot of things because I understand my own biology and I understand how my body works and reacts to things. So I know that I need to exercise in the morning. That's the way that I operate and I need to do it without any food intake. I just wake up and hit the gym and then after that I do the rest of my routine and that really works for me and works for the way that I sleep. If I do it in the evening, it just kills my onset of sleep. So...

[00:27:50] Leon: Exactly. And to give you just a quick example of what you've just mentioned and the impact it can have and that you're not the only one. There was a study performed in Europe. It was one of these observational studies and they took questionnaires from 65,000 participants. What they found is that one third were misaligned in their circadian rhythm by two hours or more. And about 70 percent of these participants were misaligned by at least one hour. 

[00:28:12] So you can imagine now being constantly jet lagged. 70 percent of the population in this study from Europe, primarily around central Europe, were misaligned, were jet lagged by one hour. 

[00:28:23] Krys: It's unbelievable. Okay, so let's wrap it up. Which are the main practical tips that you would give general people of how to maintain a healthy circadian rhythm?

[00:28:36] Leon: I would say, start with the sleep. Get to bed at the same time. I try to get to bed depending of course on, on workload and everything else, but 10 o'clock to 11, that's really my cutoff point. 11 o'clock. I don't go to bed past that. So getting the right amount of sleep, getting that routine in your sleep will start getting the pattern and the quality of sleep you need. Not eating too close to bedtime is very important. Give yourself two, three hours, three hours. Ideally with no food in you before you go to bed, stay away from blue screens.

[00:29:05] The next thing is wake up in the morning and get that routine. Is your routine having breakfast and exercising, exercising, having breakfast? But get that routine of getting the food and the sun exposure. Then see if you can go till lunchtime without food. I tend to skip lunch. That works for me. I exercise in the afternoon. I'm not a morning person really. So I get my afternoon exercise and then repeat. And then just get that routine and whatever routine it is that fits you close to those time points and those requirements. That's what I would say.

[00:29:37] Krys: That's wonderful, Leon. Thank you very much. And I want to say to our listeners that I think we messed up our circadian rhythms today because Leon is in Australia, I am in the U. S. We managed all the time zones in this conversation. So I so much appreciate having you on this conversation, it was very informative.

[00:29:56] I think it's just a good reminder about the importance of meal timing, of sleep and all those other factors that can really contribute to our health and to our well being. and I want to continue to encourage oral, or all our listeners to prioritize health, and prioritize, of course, their relationship with sleep and with nutrition.

[00:30:15] So Leon, thank you so much for being my guest today and for such an enlightening and research based conversation. Thank you so much.

[00:30:24] Leon: Thank you Kyrs. Always a pleasure.

// Outro // 

[00:30:27] Krys: Thanks again to Dr. Karagounis for being my guest today and sharing all his knowledge on this new and exciting topic. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Nutrition Unlocked. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you don't miss an episode. See you next time on Nutrition Unlocked.

[00:30:44]