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Research Suggests Effects of Shift Work or Jet Lag On Our Body Clocks Can Be Reduced By Simply Changing Meal Times (qz.com)
Jonathan Johnston reports via Quartz: Around one in five people in Western countries could be putting their health at risk simply by going to work. This is because working shifts outside of the rest of the population's normal hours has been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even declines in brain function. Scientists think this is because our bodies are programmed to run on cycles known as circadian rhythms, and changes in our routine caused by shift work or traveling long distances disrupts those rhythms. But our new research suggests that the effects of shift work or jet lag on our body clocks could be reduced simply by changing the times at which people eat. The key to this theory is the idea that each person doesn't just have a single body clock but rather a complex network of billions of cellular clocks found throughout the body. In humans and other mammals, there is a master clock within a region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and many peripheral clocks found elsewhere. For our research, we wanted to see how one aspect of this approach -- changing meal times -- affected circadian rhythms. We found that delaying meals by a certain amount caused a similar shift in some peripheral clocks, without changing the master clock. This is important because research in animals suggests peripheral clocks take longer to adjust to a new routine.
changing sleep times.
Water is wet...
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If it's true the people already affected by a lifestyle that conflicts with circadian rhythms are not typically pictures of health, we probably need a larger sample that includes overweight, jet-lagged, burnouts with dark circles under their eyes.
There seems to be enough evidence that routine within the many thousand year-old light and dark cycle is the healthiest lifestyle, but since somebody's got to man the late shift, tweaking the biological clock may be a great second option.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If someone is happy to do night shift or graveyard shift, don't keep switching it around every 2-3 weeks with the inevitable disruption.
I still haven't heard anyone explain _why_ workplaces want to keep regularly changing everyones shifts.
It takes me up to a week to get used to a new sleep schedule, so my body would be screwed up for 2 weeks every month if I had to do changing shifts.
That way your body will know it's in a different time zone and automatically adjust. For example, if you're traveling from Europe to NYC, eat a Pastrami on Rye sandwich right after you land.
That They don't want you to know: Put lithium oxide in your 7up.
It's that easy! :)
Research Suggests Effects of Shift Work or Jet Lag On Our Body Clocks Can Be Reduced By Simply Changing Meal Times
Don't most people already change their meal times to align with the new time zone ?
Or have some tap water right after arriving in Mexico, you wouldn't believe how your body adjusts and how you can stay awake.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I eat constantly, so how's that supposed to work?
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creamerd
The article says the opposite of the summary:
- the master hypothalamus "SCN clock" isn't affected by meal time.
- "peripheral clocks" may be affected, or we may just be calling things clocks that aren't
- to be healthy, peripheral clocks and SCN clock must be in sync.
so changing meal times isn't adequate.
I assume everyone who travels a lot knows this. Eat food at the time you want to be waking up in the new timezone. Your body get's a clue and goes along with it. That's why a fry up in LHR at 7.00am GMT after flying from the USA is ideal.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I get severe jet lag only when I fly business. They give nice food and bed and you sleep in the plane. Once you land your body takes several days to adjust. When I fly coach, if I force myself to stay awake all/most of the flight, I arrive dead tired. Somehow stay away till 6pm to 9pm local time after landing on the first day. Body will be so tired, it will sleep for 8 to 10 hours. No jet lag from the next day.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There are a lot of folks who have never done shift work and never will understand the impact it has on a body. I did shift work for 11 years or so, in my twenties and early thirties. Now that I'm in my early sixties there is no way I would want to go back to that. I was really lucky, the shops I worked shifts in all did shift changes based on the local college terms so we could plan to take classes in our off time. That also gave us plenty of time to settle in to a shift and even with that it could still be hard, especially the mid shift. One good thing was that we changed shifts in, what I considered, the normal order. We went from days to swings to mids and back to days. You just stayed up later each time you changed shifts, nothing easier.
While working mids I always tried to keep to my sleep schedule on my days off but many of my co-workers, especially the married ones, would get off on Friday morning and stay up to be with family during the weekend. Then they would come to work Sunday night (we started at 11pm) and try to stay awake after being up all day. As a shift supervisor I would find myself having to constantly wake them up all through the wee hours of the morning until we got off around 7am. I was usually the only one wide awake that first night back to work.
One of the hardest kind of shift work (for me) was when we went to 12 hour shifts for exercises and contingencies (active duty military). In shops doing shift work, most day shifters would work 8a-8p and didn't suffer that much... the rest of us would end up on the 8p-8a shift which screwed up pretty much everyone else's sleeping and eating schedule. Later in my career when I was in shops that only worked days, I would inevitably end up on the night 12's and the first night or two would be absolute murder, then the we would revert back to normal and I would have to go thru it all again to adjust back to regular days. Being young really helps with that but it never was easy.
The absolute worst shift work I ever heard of was the cop shops in the Air Force that would do three days, three mids, three swings, then four days off. Rotating backwards and having such short and odd shift periods was absolutely nuts by my figuring. It was impossible to go to school, or do much of anything else routine, in your off duty time with a schedule like that. You can bet the guys making up that schedule only worked the day shift.
I really hated that everything extra to regular work was scheduled during the day so that swing and mid shift workers would have to come in on their off duty time when for day shifters it was just part of the work day. When I worked mids I slept during the day so I would have to come in when I would normally be sleeping. When I worked swings if often meant getting up an hour or three earlier than normal. You'd never see a day shifter giving up their sleep time for routine appointments and other meetings.
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Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)
Goddamnit people, it's SWING SHIFT specifically that you are talking about. Any scheduled period of time that you work is "shift work", even if it is always the same schedule every day; when that schedule changes radically all the time, that is specifically SWING SHIFT. Stop saying "shift work" when you mean "swing shift".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Sleep when you are tired. Eat when you are hungry. Millions of years of evolution for the win.