Eating Affects Your Sleep and vice versa Satchin Panda #560

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A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that a lack of sleep can induce anxiety in healthy adults. Well, at least they said they were healthy. Overnight sleep deprivation triggered anxiety the next morning, along with altered brain activity patterns. And people with anxiety disorders oftentimes have trouble sleeping. And these new results show the reverse effects that poor sleep, when you have it, can induce anxiety. This came out of UC Berkeley, and they looked at 18 people following either a night of sleep or a night of staying awake. They did anxiety tests the next morning. Sleep deprivation led to 30% more anxiety than people who slept.

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And the anxiety scores reach levels of people who have anxiety disorders. And sleep deprived people's brain activity changed too. So when they looked at emotional videos, brain areas involved in emotions were more active. The prefrontal cortex, which is the part of you that helps you think and pay attention and sort of be a thinking human. It's also the part of you that slows down your anxiety. That part was less active. And this is according to functional MRI scans. So poor sleep isn't just a symptom of anxiety, but maybe it's a cause. And that is a definite call to hack your own sleep, which is particularly important. Something that wasn't in the study that's really interesting too, is that your gut bacteria also have their own separate circadian rhythm. So when you stay up all night or you're jet lagged, your gut bacteria are also jet lagged. And when they get pissed off, guess what they do? They make something called LPS or lipopolysaccharide, A very potent toxin that crosses the gut barrier and especially if you don't have an intact stomach lining, causes inflammation throughout the body, including in the brain. So LPS is bad news. And this is one of those reasons that if you're gonna stay up all night, take some charcoal already, because charcoal binds LPS and you'll feel better the next morning and you'll have less anxiety. Who would have thought you may have noticed, in my continuous evolution of becoming great at foreshadowing, that we might talk about sleep and circadian biology in today's episode. And there's a couple reasons for that. One is I'm a huge fan of understanding and learning and knowing what's going on there, because it's one of the things that's led me to perform better. And it's one of the core things that showed up in the Game Changers book in the study of the laws of high performers. These 46 laws that came out from almost 500 episodes of bulletproof Radio. Just studying with a statistician, what are the common patterns that people talk about as being most important for them to reach the level of attainment in their life or in their career to have done something noteworthy that is worth getting on the show? Well, sleep was up there. In fact, it's in law 19. And that is why today I'm really happy to have a friend and former guest of Bulletproof Radio back on the show. I'm talking about none other than Sachin Panda, Ph.D. who's a leading expert in circadian rhythm and a professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego. He has written an app called MyCircadianClock that helps you synchronize your circadian biology. His lab has been transformative because he's shown the profound impact of ambient light and daily eating, fasting on preventing huge numbers of diseases like diabetes, depression, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, cancer, and stuff like that. He's also come up with this concept of time restricted eating, and it's very related to intermittent fasting. But he says that people who eat everything within an 8 to 12 hour period can boost their circadian rhythm and maybe even reduce chronic diseases. So In February of 2018, Dr. Panda was on bulletproof radio in two different episodes. And if you didn't pick up his book about this when you heard him on those last two episodes, number 466 and 467, you need to pick up the circadian code, which is a really good overview of this. Circadian biology is tied into my work since I first read a book in 2001 from T.S. wiley called Lights, Sleep, Sugar and Survival. And her work set off my path of circadian biology. And when I got to meet Dr. Panda at the Salk Institute a couple years ago and go into his lab and look at rat melanopsin cells and talk to his PhD researchers, like, this guy is changing the world. Which is why he's on for his third time. Dr. Panda, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave. That is really nice introduction and I'm really flattered that you are such a big fan of circadian rhythm and everybody should be, because as you said, that's one of the foundations of better health.

Right. Before recording this episode, I was at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine and I gave a keynote talk and I mentioned you and your work on stage in front of thousands of anti aging doctors. And then later I was on A panel with Peter Adia, who's also been on the show, and Peter and I on our panel both mentioned your work separately. So you've made great inroads with this huge audience of people out in the trenches working with patients on making them younger. Because circadian biology is one of those things we just didn't know anything about, I would say, 20 years ago, at least anything relevant. And it's completely changed things. Why are we finding all these changes just in the period of time of your work? What happens to make us become more aware and to crack the code, given that's the title of your book?

Yeah. Well, circadian biology is a very interesting aspect of biology. If you think about every other field of biomedical research, there is a disease, and then people work on the disease. Circadian rhythm started as a very simple curiosity why we go to sleep, why we sleep for seven hours or eight hours. And is there a clock inside? And what has happened is in the last 20 years, the key discoveries can be summarized into three major things. 1 is people discovered that just like our brain has a clock, almost every organ has its own clock. And that completely transformed how we think about circadian clocks. Second one was we also figured out that blue light is a strong agent in sunlight that resets our clock, or having exposure to blue light at night can disrupt the clock. And the third major discovery was how food timing affects our clock. So these three really transformed how we think about health. Because if you think about now, what circadian rhythm field is doing, this is the only field that's actually studying what is health. Because all other fields of biomedical research study what is disease. So we can go over these three major discoveries or breakthroughs in circadian rhythm field. The first one is every organ has its clock. And that's a profound statement, because if we think about clock, we always think about sleep. That means just like our brain has a clock that tells our brain to sleep for seven to eight hours at night, it also tells our brain that the peak time to do complex math, have complex business negotiation or solve problem is somewhere, say between 8am and 2pm so that means if other organs have clogged, they should have an optimum time to do their job. And they also need downtime, to rest, reset, and rejuvenate. So slowly over the last 20 years, people working in this field are finding out that, yes, that's true. Just like our brain has a clock, liver has a clock, and it can digest food and can nurture our body for only 7 to 8 hours or maximum, say 12 hours and then it needs downtime. So similarly, our gut has a clock. Even the microbiome that lives inside the gut, they have a circadian clock on it. Daily clock muscles have a clock. So now if you think of every single. If we think of our health, our health is a product of our organs and hormones. And when our organs, hormones and brain chemicals rise and fall at the right time, then our body clock synchronize and we are at top performance. So that's a very profound concept that's evolving in circadian rhythm field.

You mentioned the liver quite a lot in there. And it's funny, people oftentimes don't associate circadian things and sleep with what the liver is doing. Tell me more about why you brought that up.

Well, liver is the. If you think about, liver is one of the largest solid organ that is very important for metabolism. So it produces fuel for almost every part of our body, including brain. It also breaks down a lot of xenobiotics, or unwanted molecules that we ingest. This is also a place where we produce many of the key molecules for fighting infection. So liver plays a huge role in our health. And in fact, interestingly, most of the circadian studies these days have moved away from looking at the brain, and they are more and more looking at the liver, since liver plays such a big role. So, for example, if we think about fasting, then liver is the major place where we should. Our liver produces some ketone bodies towards the end of our 14, 16 or 18 hours of fasting, and that ketone body is transported to our heart and brain for better function. So in that way, liver plays a huge role in fueling our brain and keeping us smart.

It really matters so much. One of the studies that I was really pleased to see that came out of UC San Diego was Dr. Kinane's research that showed the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee doubled ketone production. So let's see, I just slept all night, which is a fasting window, unless you sleep, eat, and then all of a sudden you wake up and you want to get some more of those ketones. That will happen if you skip breakfast. But if you have black coffee, you're going to have more ketones than if you didn't, according to that study. And of course, if you're doing bulletproof coffee where you have brain octane in there, you can be sure you're getting some extra ketones in the morning. And for me, that's just been a profound awakening of my brain, given that I used to weigh 300 pounds and had autoimmunity things and high, high blood sugar and prediabetes and all the other crap that I had to deal with when I was younger. So it's no wonder that the liver matters. But if you look at traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, all these Eastern systems of healing, a lot of them are heavily focused on liver and kidneys, and of course they care about the brain. But it seems like we're now using circadian biology to rediscover things that maybe we knew a thousand years ago. Do you agree with that?

Well, the thing is, when it comes to health and wellness, anything that we can think of has already been tried in human history because.