Study finds dopamine, biological clock link to snacking, overeating and obesity | Hacker News Reader

Study finds dopamine, biological clock link to snacking, overeating and obesity

sciencedaily.com

67 pointsLinuxBender20 comments

There's a documentary (free on Amazon Prime) called "Fasting" that touches on this same hypothesis. Basically, our bodies are wired to eat late morning to early evening. Calories consumed outside of those hours are much more likely to turn into fat.

Optimum eating window is somewhere around 11AM or noon for most people to 6PM at the latest. When people reduce their eating window, without counting calories or doing anything else, they often lose weight. This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

I definitely recommend the movie if you want to learn more--it kept me engaged the entire time. I've also done 2 cycles of ProLon (mentioned in the movie and has significant scientific backing) to boost my own immune system, so I'm a believer in fasting as a health benefit.

What exactly is ProLon? Is it just moving your feeding window to 11am-6pm?

I searched on Google but the first few links offer no insight except the impression I might have to pay money to learn more.

Its the commercialization of this:

A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)...

You can do it yourself without any kind of kit, if you count calories. I've done it 7 times so far. Due for another one soon.

  This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

No, the proper term for this is "time-restricted feeding".

Thanks for pointing out the distinction here.

Regardless of how we define each term, there's a notable difference between normal eating within constrained hours and unsustainable/varied patterns between days. The "metabolic switch" rationales for periodic/daily fasting don't apply to time-restricted eating, nor do some of the insulin/glucose theories, but the circadian ones work for both.

Interesting recommendation, thanks. I'm curious about the evidence for this "wired to eat" model w/r/t time restriction. It obviously seems plausible, especially in light of this study. But "without counting calories" isn't the same as "while eating the same way", and this seems likely to greatly alter eating habits.

It pushes away from eating high-cal, low satiation breakfast foods, or overlarge restaurant portions at night. It limits idle or social snacking at night, and might push people towards high-satiation "real" meals midday instead of quicker options.

More broadly, energetics studies find that people under-correct for almost all energetic changes, including meal skipping and alternate day fasting. Eating 11-6 commonly means skipping breakfast and tea/snacking, which we expect people won't fully compensate for.

It wouldn't surprise me if circadian-friendly time restriction was genuinely better for us than other changes, especially via not eating late at night and thereby sleeping better. But I'd still expect the weight-loss result to come more from the disruption than the timing.

Just to clarify the title a little "biological clock" in this circumstance isn't about lifespan, it is about your body's natural desire to eat (specifically when to eat).

They found, in mice, that high-calorie diets at meals resulted in eating more often between meals. From the article:

> Güler's team found that mice fed a diet comparable to a wild diet in calories and fats maintained normal eating and exercise schedules and proper weight. But mice fed high-calorie diets laden with fats and sugars began "snacking" at all hours and became obese.

I'd wonder though if they're re-measuring the gut bacteria phenomenon that has previously been observed. Essentially your gut bacteria can encourage you to eat certain foods, if you eat too much of one kind of food you over-bread that specific bacteria (and suppress others) resulting in a "waterfall" over desire for the food that bacteria need.

https://www.nature.com/articles/4441009a

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03698...

It is great to see this kind of studies being done, as they are against the best interests of big food companies who usually don't care about the public health.

This phenomenon is already known in many circles but is still being rejected regularly by some people as not being backed by sufficient scientific data. Well here is some data. Hope to see more of it.

To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a pretty monumental achievement of industrialized agriculture.

To paraphrase Harvey Dent, the big food companies have stuck around long enough to see themselves become the villains.

> To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a pretty monumental achievement of industrialized agriculture.

I have to agree that this really is a monumental achievement.

Calorie-dense food is no longer scarce but in abundance. We are not hearing much about starvations at least in the "developed world".

But on the flip side many people now have some kind of metabolic disease. Nearly everybody in my family is suffering from at least one metabolic disease mainly caused by a compromised sugar metabolism which in turn is caused by processed foods. And this is really causing a great suffering.

So the solution to the original problem begot a new kind of problem. Is the new problem better than the original one? Debatable.

Now we can support a much larger population much more easily (which is just what we need). But a population that is a lot less healthy than the previous generations. Quality is in decline.

Anyway it's still "progress", and yeah, a monumental one. If only they knew where to stop. They never do...

Funny, the same thing happens to my cats if I leave dry food out for them versus feeding them wet food at morning and night.

What happens, in which case do they eat more?

They get fat from eating the always available dry food. Wet food is way better for them, high moisture and protein, dry food is typically the equivalent of the junk food.

I'm glad I asked. With my dog, it's the opposite. He binges wet food. Dry food I leave a bowl full at all times. He eats when he's hungry, no binging.

Thought - cats typically need higher quality food than dogs, dogs are much more opportunistic. (And more similar to us in that respect, I guess.)

That makes sense to me, my dog will eat until full, sometimes if she manages to find some scraps she won’t finish her dry food (we give her 3/4 cup day and night).

Curious about the dog binging on wet food, how much are you making available?

Rarely, it's a novelty and he loves it. But he gets an upset stomach, so I've gone back to (best quality I could find, no grain etc) dry food.

I think for him, wet dog food and "found" human food are equally delicious. He likes the dry food too whenever I switch flavor, but tires of it over the weeks the bag lasts.

As someone who has recently starting dealing with a somewhat significant weight problem, I would like to disagree with the premise a little bit.

I have put on quite a lot of weight recently as a result of two simple things: one, I am older. This probably is not a big part of it.

Two, I just stopped exercising for a few months. Meaning, I have not even been doing my daily walks.

I don't often eat snacks or really large meals. Sometimes only one meal in a day. But since I often don't move around _at all_ except for minimal tasks, and have spent a lot of time sitting at the computer, I have been putting on weight rapidly.

So yeah, my New Years resolution is to go back to walking every day.

In mice

There's a twitter account for that https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice/status/121489166821166694...

Yeah, that's what I was riffing off

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