Circadian Code to Extend Longevity | Satchin Panda | TEDxVeniceBeach

what was Venice Beach before [Applause] [Music] so imagine when the baby was born in the year 1900 she lived only after the years of 47 the major health challenges for infectious disease and microbes were the causes of disease so scientist came up with antibiotics and vaccines to save life and now in the year 2017 when a baby is born si is expected to live that long healthy life of up to 80 years but as we grow old almost all of us will suffer from at least one or more chronic disease that's obesity diabetes cardiovascular disease even cancer and the scary thing is the cure is rare the medical cure works best only when it's combined with healthy lifestyle but what is lifestyle it's very confusing because it ranges from how many fruits and vegetables we eat in a day to taking 10,000 steps to be mindful so we wanted to fit all of these into a very simple and crisp definition and we came up with this lifestyle is what when and how much we eat sleep and move on a daily basis almost all of you know what we eat affects our health and how much we eat also makes us healthier sick what about when we're not talking about eating breakfast we're talking out a different time and why the timing matters the reason timing matters is all of our bodies have a timing system or a clock that runs on at 24 hours bases are called circadian clock or CKD and rhythm for example if you locked me inside this room with no access to any timing then I will go to sleep around 10:00 p.m. at night and my deepest sleep will happen around 2:00 and anticipating morning my body will start to warm up and as soon as I wake up my melatonin level will drop and stress hormone level will dries so around noon my brain will be at its peak performance time and around afternoon my muscle will be at its peak performance time and as the evening sets in my body will cool down and melatonin level will rise and again I'll go back to sleep around 10:00 p.m. it will go on and on every 24 hours so overall this biological clock or circadian rhythm organizes our life into sleep nutrition and physical activity to the right time of the day these three fundamental pillars of our health have to happen at the right time and if we stay awake late into the night finishing an assignment or taking care of the loved ones the next day we feel horrible and if we continue to do this then our clocks break down and we get a host of different diseases and this is just a small simple soft set of those diseases there trends from ADHD asthma diabetes obesity depression anxiety and even after cancer so this tells us how important this akkadian clock is but how does the system work so for the past 20 years what we have discovered is every morning as we open our eyes the bright light signals retina and synchronizes a small part of the brain that has masters akkadian clock to the day/night cycle and this brain clock sends hormonal signal to rest of our body but what is really surprising is this just like our brain has a clock almost every organ in our body even every cell in our body has its own clock and the brain signal synchronizes all these clocks so they work together to produce daily rhythms in behavior physiology and metabolism and when we move from one time zone to another time zone or when the long summer days transition into short winter night soft winter days then what happens is the change in daylight is sensed by our eye and then our clock research to the neo daylight but very surprising thing that kind of confused scientists from almost 100 years was this even blind people when they move from one time zone to another time John they could reset their clock perfectly fine as if there was a hidden light sensor in the eye we didn't know about so almost 15 years ago we made a huge discovery that made it to the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by the prestigious science magazine and the discovery was we found the blue light sensing protein called melanopsin that's present in 5000 squiggly neurons in our eye and the same protein is found in both normal people and also blind people and these neurons are literally hardware to the master clock in our brain but these neurons actually work slightly differently in a moonlight night you may be able to see moonlight or you can see candle light but that light is not enough to fully activate melanopsin so the brain thinks it's dark so our body's natural sleep hormone melatonin rises at night and we get good night's sleep and next day when you wake up and go outside for an hour on the bright light that bright daylight fully activate melanopsin it resynchronize Azure cloth to the day/night cycle it improves a lot nice we feel less sleepy and reduces depression but over the last hundred years we have moved into indoor spaces we spend more than 90% of our time in demand the bright light and bright screen at night active as melanopsin it reduces sleep hormone melatonin and we have sleep disruption and the next day when you wake up to an alarm clock and stay most of the day endure it further confuses our clock because a body doesn't get enough light to resynchronize our clock and if it continues then we get depression and anxiety and that's why light for vision is not same as light for health this is a very simple idea 15 years ago but that has started a new revolution in lighting in fact now architects and lighting engineers are coming up with new security and lighting for buildings of the future and right now almost every smartphone and every laptop produced comes with an automatic program to change the screen brightness and screen color at night so it's really humbling to see a very simple discovery we made 15 years ago the fruits of those discoveries have already raised billions of people and there is knowledge in their hand to improve their circadian rhythm but we did not stop there we knew that people who sleep less or sleep late become sick so we wanted to know what happens when people don't sleep enough so when we peer into lighted cities are lighted buildings or into lighted living rooms of people then people don't just stare at lighted screen at night as long as they stay awake they eat so that means as long as their eyes are open our mouth is open so we wanted to know what is the effect of food on our circadian clock so we went back to love and we met another huge discovery that is just like light at night distorts our brain clock and keeps us awake for that the wrong time can disrupt circadian rhythm and disrupt our normal metabolism but how do we figure that out so just imagine suppose say in the morning you have your first breakfast as soon as we have that first meal the body starts to use carbohydrates as energy and stores a little bit of fat and as we continue the day with lunch and dinner a body continues burning carbs and storing fat and in the evening after the last meal as we continue into the night then the body runs low on carb and starts to burn some fat so every day if this rhythm continues then we have this complementary or opposite rhythm in burning sugar and boy fat and these two rhythms actually help us maintain body weight but what happens if we just extend that last meal late into the night so in this case our body's circadian rhythm becomes much CLO so it continues to make fat for very long period of time and there is not enough time actually to burn fat naturally so imagine if we compare the same person eating everything within 10 hours we'll have a very robust security and rhythm in metabolism and we'll have few hours of burning fat and the same person spreading the calories over 15 hours may not reap that benefit was it a wild thought or there is some truth to it so we went back to lab and then we brought two identical set of mice the same is born to the same parents in the same room now gave one group of mice a fatty food and they could eat whenever they wanted and the second group was trained to eat the same identical diet in the same number of calories every day and we where demise and where D food every week to make sure that these two groups at the same number of calories and we did this for 18 weeks and at the 18 weeks there was something really surprising the mice that aid this very full random time or obese they could not born enough fat and mice that had the same number of calories from the same fatty food where 28% less and the reduction in body where it was largely due to reduction in body fat and this was really a Eureka moment because 400 years nutrition science has taught us to count calories and watch carve protein and fat in our diet and what we discovered is it's not only what you eat when you eat also matters so we went back to the lab again and then made sure that what we're discovering is true and applies to lot of different diets so we brought mice and gave them food for eight hours 9 hours 10 11 or 12 hours sometimes we even get demise week and off as you partying and then sometimes we get them food that is high carb high fat high sucrose even high cholesterol and when we go back and compare these two groups of mice the result came out always the same mice when they eat all their food within 8 to 12 hours remain healthy irrespective of what food they eat whereas mice that ate random time they become fat and their two surprising things that also came out one is if we take fat mice and give them food within eight to ten hours then they become normal and all their sickness goes away and if you take hell demise eating healthy food but randomly throughout 24 hours then over the period of time they also become sick this was really eye-opening and what all of these mouse experiments told us was just like our brain has a clock to make us sleep and wake up every day all our organ clocks need some downtime to rest reset and rejuvenate every day so we wanted to test when do people actually eat and can they change this behavior so we started a study and that's actually all online and with app people can go to this website my circadian clock dodgy sign off and then download an app and people love taking pictures of everything so we asked them to take pictures of everything that a they eat drink over two to three weeks period and when these pictures come to our server we organize them on a time scale so that it's easy for us to see how their eating pattern is so as we line up this this timing of their food along time scale we also see something very interesting that is most people at least this particular example it's very randomly and you all can actually sign up this study is open to all of you and you can download the app and you can see your own photograph and what is interesting is if we this person sitting pattern during weekday and weekend they all look random and if we combine the data to witness or we can then what we find is although this person did not travel it almost looks like he ate in one timezone during weekdays and went to another time zone in weekend and if we combine this and floated around a clock so that it's easy for you to figure out how this was an 8 over 24 hours then what you'll find is this person could eat any time of the 24 hours you might say that this is all random one outlier but actually almost all hundred 50 people in our study who had a regular nine-to-five job and claimed that they eat healthy has similar eating pattern the bottom line is 50% of adults eat for 15 hours or longer so that means if your first sip of coffee with her 6 o'clock in the morning your last sip of wine a last bite might be at 9:00 or later at night so if this knowledge we asked a very simple thing if we take overweight people who eat for 15 hours or longer and ask them to choose their own 10 hours that fit their lifestyle and eat everything that they want within that 10 hours what happens so in the first group of people we brought some people who are overweight and they were eating for 15 hours we asked them to choose their 10 hours they did that for 16 weeks and after 16 weeks they were less and then we let them go free after one year we brought them back to the lab surprisingly they still meant and that lost body weight and when we asked them why did you stick to this habit it was not the body weight lost that they were they were excited about they said this could sleep better they felt more energetic throughout the day the joint fence reduced so they could go for a walk or Iran and this was really exciting and in the next phase over the last one year thousands of people from all over the world are signing up for our study and they are sharing their data and their sharing of their experience with what happens when they use their timing of heating and we've become more disciplined and eat for 10 to 12 hours and all of these are teaching us one big thing that is a body's biological clock it's just like a simple scheduling program it has programmed us to eat and sleep at the right time of the day or night and if we stick to this our appointment with her biological clock then we stay healthy and just like showing up randomly at work can ruin your career showing up for lunch breakfast and dinner or for your sleep at random time of the day can ruin your health but the good news is this is all reversible even if we have some chronic condition if we select our 10 to 12 hours eating period and sleep well we can reverse or cure lot of chronic diseases that affect more than a billion people on this planet thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 71,911

Rating: 4.9154077 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Biology, Brain, Happiness, Medicine, Mental health, Research, Science

Id: wrP78K1objc

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018