We’ve talked before about how circadian rhythm pertains not just to when it is ideal for us to sleep or be awake, but also at what times it is best to eat, exercise, and so forth:

The Circadian Rhythm: Far More Than Most People Know

Most people just know about the light consideration, per for example:

• How light can shift your mood and mental health, and
• How light tells you when to sleep, focus and poo

When your body parts clock on and off at the wrong time…

Now, new research has brought attention to how these things and more are governed by different physiological clocks within our bodies—and what this means for our health. In other words, if you are doing the various things at different times than you “should”, you will be training the different parts of your body (each with their independent clocks) to be on a different schedule, and so the different parts of your body will out of temporal sync with each other.

To put this in jet-lag terms: if your brain is in New York, while your heart is in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and your gut is in Tokyo, then this arrangement is not good for the health.

As for how it is not good for your health (i.e. the consequences) there’s still research to be done on some of the longer-term implications, but in the short term, one of the biggest effects is on our mood—most notably, increasing depression scores significantly.

And even more importantly, this is in the real world. That is to say, until quite recently, most data we had from studies on the circadian rhythm was from sleep clinic laboratories, which is great for RCTs but will always have as a limitation that someone sleeping in a lab is going to have some differences than someone sleeping in their own bed at home.

As the researchers said:

❝A critical step to addressing this is the noninvasive collection of physiological time-series data outside laboratory settings in large populations. Digital tools offer promise in this endeavor. Here, using wearable data, we first quantify the degrees of circadian disruption, both between different internal rhythms and between each internal rhythm and the sleep-wake cycle. Our analysis, based on over 50,000 days of data from over 800 first-year training physicians, reveals bidirectional links between digital markers of circadian disruption and mood both before and after they began shift work, while accounting for confounders such as demographic and geographic variables. We further validate this by finding clinically relevant changes in the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire score.❞

Read in full: The real-world association between digital markers of circadian disruption and mental health risks

That questionnaire by the way sounds like an arbitrary thing they just made up, but the PHQ-9 (as it is known to its friends) is in fact the current intentional gold standard for measuring depression; we share it at the top of our article about depression, here:

The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← the test takes 2 minutes and you get immediate results

Want to know more?

For more about getting one’s entire self back into temporal sync (hey, wasn’t that the plot of a Star Trek episode?), sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus wrote this excellent book that we reviewed a little while back:

The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype—And Learn the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More – by Dr. Michael Breus

Enjoy!

How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

You asked us to do a main feature on inflammation, so here we go!

Before we start, it’s worth noting an important difference between acute and chronic inflammation:

• Acute inflammation is generally when the body detects some invader, and goes to war against it. This (except in cases such as allergic responses) is usually helpful.
• Chronic inflammation is generally when the body does a civil war. This is almost never helpful.

We’ll be tackling the latter, which frees up your body’s resources to do better at the former.

First, the obvious…

These five things are as important for this as they are for most things:

1. Get a good diet—the Mediterranean diet is once again a top-scorer
2. Exercise—move and stretch your body; don’t overdo it, but do what you reasonably can, or the inflammation will get worse.
3. Reduce (or ideally eliminate) alcohol consumption. When in pain, it’s easy to turn to the bottle, and say “isn’t this one of red wine’s benefits?” (it isn’t, functionally*). Alcohol will cause your inflammation to flare up like little else.
4. Don’t smoke—it’s bad for everything, and that goes for inflammation too.
5. Get good sleep. Obviously this can be difficult with chronic pain, but do take your sleep seriously. For example, invest in a good mattress, nice bedding, a good bedtime routine, etc.

*Resveratrol (which is a polyphenol, by the way), famously found in red wine, does have anti-inflammatory properties. However, to get enough resveratrol to be of benefit would require drinking far more wine than will be good for your inflammation or, indeed, the rest of you. So if you’d like resveratrol benefits, consider taking it as a supplement. Superficially it doesn’t seem as much fun as drinking red wine, but we assure you that the results will be much more fun than the inflammation flare-up after drinking.

About the Mediterranean Diet for this…

There are many causes of chronic inflammation, but here are some studies done with some of the most common ones:

• Beneficial effect of Mediterranean diet in systemic lupus erythematosus patients
• How the Mediterranean diet and some of its components modulate inflammatory pathways in arthritis
• The effects of the Mediterranean diet on biomarkers of vascular wall inflammation and plaque vulnerability in subjects with high risk for cardiovascular disease
• Adherence to Mediterranean diet and 10-year incidence of diabetes: correlations with inflammatory and oxidative stress biomarkers*

*Type 1 diabetes is a congenital autoimmune disorder, as the pancreas goes to war with itself. Type 2 diabetes is different, being a) acquired and b) primarily about insulin resistance, and/but this is related to chronic inflammation regardless. It is also possible to have T1D and go on to develop insulin resistance, and that’s very bad, and/but beyond the scope of today’s newsletter, in which we are focusing on the inflammation aspects.

Some specific foods to eat or avoid…

Eat these:

• Leafy greens
• Cruciferous vegetables
• Tomatoes
• Fruits in general (berries in particular)
• Healthy fats, e.g. olives and olive oil
• Almonds and other nuts
• Dark chocolate (choose high cocoa, low sugar)

Avoid these:

• Processed meats (absolute worst offenders are hot dogs, followed by sausages in general)
• Red meats
• Sugar (includes most fruit juices, but not most actual fruits—the difference with actual fruits is they still contain plenty of fiber, and in many cases, antioxidants/polyphenols that reduce inflammation)
• Dairy products (unless fermented, in which case it seems to be at worst neutral, sometimes even a benefit, in moderation)
• White flour (and white flour products, e.g. white bread, white pasta, etc)
• Processed vegetable oils

See also: 9 Best Drinks To Reduce Inflammation, Says Science

Supplements?

Some supplements that have been found to reduce inflammation include:

• L-theanine
• Ashwagandha
• Turmeric w/ black pepper

(links are to studies showing their efficacy)

Consider Intermittent Fasting

Remember when we talked about the difference between acute and chronic inflammation? It’s fair to wonder “if I reduce my inflammatory response, will I be weakening my immune system?”, and the answer is: generally, no.

Often, as with the above supplements and dietary considerations, reducing inflammation actually results in a better immune response when it’s actually needed! This is because your immune system works better when it hasn’t been working in overdrive constantly.

Here’s another good example: intermittent fasting reduces the number of circulating monocytes (a way of measuring inflammation) in healthy humans—but doesn‘t compromise antimicrobial (e.g. against bacteria and viruses) immune response.

See for yourself: Dietary Intake Regulates the Circulating Inflammatory Monocyte Pool ← the study is about the anti-inflammatory effects of fasting