While it may be hard to fit nutritious meals into a busy day especially for someone who works late hours, it appears that eating at nighttime could be bad for your health.

In a study by the National Institutes of Health, a team divided 19 participants, both women and men, into two different groups with different schedules for meals. One group ate during the day, while the other group ate at night. The participants who ate at nighttime showed a 6.4% increase in glucose levels. This can lead to a variety of severe health issues including heart disease and diabetes.

The research reinforces that at what time you eat does matter for determining outcomes of health such as blood sugar levels. This is relevant for workers at night as they will usually eat while on their night shift.

If you do eat at night, there are a few things at play that can effect glucose levels. Typically a person eats easy to grab, highly processed foods that are high in calories, salt and sugar. And the inability to burn some of the calories before you go to bed can result in weight gain.

One of the most important things a person can do is to change eating habits by putting together a daytime routine. Staying away from erratic eating times and creating a consistent eating schedule will go a long way towards benefiting a persons health.

To view the original scientific study click below:
Daytime eating prevents internal circadian misalignment and glucose intolerance in night work

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A new clinical research project has shown that the commonly used food additive carboxymethylcellulose will alter a healthy person’s intestinal environment. This will upset the levels of nutrients and good bacteria. The findings indicate that there needs to be further study on the impact of this food additive on the health of people.

Carboxymethycellulose, known as CMC, is a member of synthetic food additives called emulsifiers. They are used in a variety of processed foods to promote their shelf life and enhance texture. It has increasingly been used since the 1960s and has not been tested extensively in humans. It was thought that CMC was safe because the body eliminates it instead of absorbing it. However scientists are challenging this assumption because of the increasing value of health benefits from bacteria that live in the colon.

Tests on mice have shown that CMC and other emulsifiers did alter gut bacteria which resulted in more severe diseases. These included inflammatory conditions such as metabolic syndrome, colon cancer and colitis.

The researchers did a randomized, controlled study in volunteers that were healthy. The participants were housed at the site of the study. They consumed a diet that was additive free or the same diet with CMC. Due to the fact that the diseases CMC promotes in mice will take years to happen in humans, the team focused on metabolites and intestinal bacteria. They discovered that the consumption of CMC did change the make-up of bacteria that populate the colon by reducing some species. Also, fecal samples from the participants on the CMC diet showed an obvious depletion of the metabolites that are beneficial to maintain a healthy colon.

The team did colonoscopies on participants at the start and at the end of the research. They observed a subset of participants that consumed CMC had gut bacteria that encroached into the mucus. This has been previously noted to be a characteristic of type 2 diabetes and inflammation of the bowel. The consumption of CMC didn’t result in any particular disease during the two week study. But the results do support the conclusions of the animal studies that consuming CMC on a long term basis promote chronic inflammatory diseases. Further research of CMC is warranted.

It does disprove the argument that CMC just passes through the body to justify any lack of studies on the additive. Besides supporting the reason for further research of CMC, the current study does provide a blueprint to test individual additives that are added to food in a well controlled way.

The results have suggested that the CMC responses and most likely a variety of other additives to food are personalized. The team is now working on approaches to help predict which people might be sensitive to certain additives.

Click here to view the original scientific study:
Randomized controlled-feeding study of dietary emulsifier carboxymethylcellulose reveals detrimental impacts on the gut microbiota and metabolome

Have you ever wondered if diet has a more important role than drugs for good metabolic health? A new study set out to find whether it was diet or drugs that play a more powerful role in a person’s health.

The research was done in advance of a clinical study by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. It found that conditions such as stroke, diabetes and heart disease could be kept at bay by the control of our diet.

They discovered that diet can indeed be more beneficial to how our cells perform than drugs. This study was in addition to the team’s work already done in humans and mice that demonstrated how diet and specific combinations of proteins, fats and carbohydrates can protect the body. Conditions such as obesity, aging, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and immune dysfunction are affected by a persons diet.

The team used mice for the study because they have the same nutrient-signalling pathways as humans. The research consisted of 40 different treatments, each having a variety of a combination of fat and carbohydrates, proteins, calories and 3 anti-aging drugs. The drugs are designed to act on the same pathways as diet.

A persons diet can be very powerful for keeping the body healthy. Currently drugs are used without considering how they may interact with nutrients. Researchers wanted to know if interactions between diet and drugs would make them more or less effective. One goal of the study was to discover how these drugs would affect the liver which is the organ that regulates metabolism.

This study was different in that it used a nutritional geometric framework. Instead of focusing on one isolated nutrient it considered how interactions and mixtures of various nutrients affect health and disease.

It was found that the nutritional parts of a diet affect the body differently. For example, total calories and protein are found to be important in the way cells function. The amount eaten affected activity in the mitochondria which produce energy creating a subsequent effect. This helps the cells accurately convert their genes into various proteins essential for proper function and creating new ones. This can fundamentally affect aging.

When the drugs were used they primarily acted to diffuse the cell’s metabolic response to a diet instead of changing them. But they found that the biochemical effects had specific interactions between the drugs and diet. One drug created more of an effect by a diet of fat and carbohydrates while another drug blocked effects when eating protein. The complex study found it important to study numerous different diets instead of comparing just a few.

Overall, what we eat can influence our health. This study shows how our cells operate can be impacted by diet relating to health and aging.

To view the original scientific study click below:
Nutritional reprogramming of mouse liver proteome is dampened by metformin, resveratrol, and rapamycin