Time-restricted eating could prevent disease

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Time-restricted eating – eating meals at a specific time and fasting for the rest of the day – affects the expression of the body’s genes and could help prevent or treat diseases such as cancer or diabetes.

Time-restricted eating could prevent disease

Limiting food intake to a certain period of time, known as time-restricted feeding, appears to have health benefits, from lowering shift workers’ cholesterol, sugar and blood pressure levels to lowering complications from COVID, and it has even been linked in laboratory studies to an increase in life expectancy.

The results of these studies have shown that intermittent fasting could be a good strategy to improve the well-being of the population. However, it is not known exactly how it affects the organism at the molecular level and how these changes interact in multiple organ systems.

Now, a team of scientists from the Salk Institute has verified in a study carried out with mice how time-restricted feeding influences gene expression in more than 22 regions of the body and brain. Gene expression is the process by which genes are activated and respond to their environment by creating proteins.

“By changing the timing of the meal, we were able to change gene expression not only in the gut or liver, but also in thousands of genes in the brain.”

These findings – published in Cell Metabolism – have implications for a wide variety of health problems where time-restricted eating has been shown to have potential benefits, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer.

“We found that there is a system-wide molecular impact of time-restricted feeding in mice,” said Professor Satchidananda Panda, lead author and holder of the Rita and Richard Atkinson Chair at Salk. “Our results open the door to take a closer look at how this nutritional intervention activates genes involved in specific diseases, such as cancer.”

Restricting eating hours altered body and brain genes

To carry out the investigation, the same high-calorie diet was administered to two groups of mice. One group had free access to food, while the other group was forced to eat within a nine-hour feeding window each day. After seven weeks, tissue samples were obtained from 22 groups of organs and the brain—liver, stomach, lungs, heart, adrenal gland, hypothalamus, various parts of the kidney and intestine, and various areas of the brain—at different times of the day or at night, and analyzed for genetic changes. The researchers found that 70% of mouse genes respond to time-restricted feeding. “By changing the timing of the meal, we were able to change gene expression not just in the gut or liver, but also in thousands of genes in the brain,” Panda said.

About 40% of the genes in the adrenal gland, hypothalamus, and pancreas—which are involved in hormonal regulation—were affected by time-restricted feeding. Hormones coordinate functions in different parts of the body and brain, and hormonal imbalance is implicated in many diseases, from diabetes to stress disorders, so the results provide insight into how time-restricted eating can help control these illnesses.

The researchers found that not all sections of the digestive tract were affected equally, and that while the genes involved in the two upper portions of the small intestine—the duodenum and the jejunum—were activated by time-restricted feeding, the ileum, at the lower end of the small intestine, it was not.

This finding could open up a new line of research to study how shift work, which disrupts our 24-hour biological clock (known as circadian rhythms), influences the onset of digestive diseases and cancer. The researchers also found that time-restricted eating aligned the circadian rhythms of multiple organs in the body.

“Circadian rhythms are everywhere in every cell,” Panda said. “We found that time-restricted eating synchronized circadian rhythms to have two main waves: one during fasting and one just after eating. We suspect that this allows the body to coordinate different processes.”

The next goal of Panda’s team is to look more closely at the effects of time-restricted feeding on specific conditions or systems implicated in the study, such as atherosclerosis, which is a hardening of the arteries that is a risk factor for the development of heart disease and stroke, in addition to chronic kidney failure.

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