Dr. Satchin Panda: Intermittent Fasting to Improve Health, Cognition & Longevity

In this episode, my guest is Satchin Panda, PhD, professor and the director of the Regulatory Biology Laboratories at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. We discuss his lab’s discovery that “time-restricted eating” (TRE) aka intermittent fasting, is beneficial effects for metabolic health and longevity. Dr. Panda explains how TRE, and also longer fasts, can positively impact obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular health, age-related chronic diseases, and improve mood and cognitive performance. He also describes how the timing of eating, light exposure and exercise that ~50% of all people engage in, negatively impacts their health and explains how specific simple adjustments to these can positively shift their subjective feelings of health and biomarkers of cardiovascular function, glucose regulation and metabolism. We discuss how our circadian behaviors, which include our patterns of eating, sleeping and socializing, have an enormous impact on our biology, mood and health and how by simply confining our calorie consumption to a semi-regular daily window, can positively impact our physical health, mental health and longevity.

Other Resources

• My Circadian Clock app
• Ontime Health app

Articles

• Revival of light signalling in the postmortem mouse and human retina (Nature)
• Circadian alignment of early onset caloric restriction promotes longevity in male C57BL/6J mice (Science)
• Time-restricted eating with or without low-carbohydrate diet reduces visceral fat and improves metabolic syndrome: A randomized trial00332-9?returnURL=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2666379122003329%3Fshowall%3Dtrue) (Cell Reports Medicine_)
• Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend31522-6) (Current Biology)
• Feasibility of time-restricted eating and impacts on cardiometabolic health in 24-h shift workers: The Healthy Heroes randomized control trial (Cell Metabolism)
• Access to Electric Light Is Associated with Shorter Sleep Duration in a Traditionally Hunter-Gatherer Community (Journal of Biological Rhythms)
• Daily Eating Patterns and Their Impact on Health and Disease (Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism)

Books

• The Circadian Code
• The Circadian Diabetes Code