If the sinful excess of holiday eating sends your system into butter-slathered, brandy-soaked overload, you are not alone: People who are jet-lagged, people who work graveyard shifts and plain-old late-night snackers know just how you feel.
A new study by researchers at the University of California, San
Francisco (UCSF) is helping to reveal how these activities upset the body's "food clock," a collection of
interacting genes and molecules known technically as the
food-entrainable oscillator, which keeps the human body on a metabolic
even keel.
The work of the study has implications for understanding the molecular basis of
diabetes, obesity and other metabolic syndromes in relation to a desynchronized
food clock may serve as part of the pathology underlying these
disorders.
Louis Ptacek, MD, the John C. Coleman Distinguished
Professor of Neurology at UCSF and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Investigator commented that "It may also help explain why night owls are more likely to be obese than morning larks,"he added; "Understanding the molecular mechanism of how eating at the "wrong"
time of the day desynchronizes the clocks in our body can facilitate the
development of better treatments for disorders associated with
night-eating syndrome, shift work and jet lag".
Read further details in the ScienceDaily article: How excess holiday eating disturbs your 'food clock'
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