Actionable Knowledge

• If you eat a late dinner or snack before bedtime, you may fall asleep at 10 pm, but your bioreactor will be awake working for up to another 6 hours, finally falling asleep at 4 am. Further, when you wake up at 6 am and eat breakfast at 8 am, you may have had 8 hours of sleep, but with the first bite, the bioreactor awakens with only 4 hours of sleep. Your bioreactor and microbiome are getting half the time for their required Rest, Repair, and Recovery portion of the 5Rs.
• The new science has revealed there is much more to the circadian rhythm than regulating the awake sleep cycle. The exact biochemical systems of the circadian rhythm that use hormones to maintain the awake sleep cycle also use other hormones to maintain the energy use or storage cycle.
• Eating carbs before sleep will cause the body to have insulin, not growth hormone, as the dominant hormone. This results in two significantly adverse consequences: 1) when insulin is given energy in the form of glucose, but there is no activity requiring energy (such as when sleeping), that energy will be stored as body and liver fat, and 2) with less growth hormone and less protein, there will be less cellular repair.
• What does all this mean in practical terms? A pizza and beer are likely to have a very different impact on weight and metabolic conditions when eaten for lunch than when eaten in the evening at the local pub or craft brewery, even though both meals have the exact same composition and calories. It also means in a diet with a balance of sugar, starches, fiber (i.e., carbohydrates), and protein, it's much better to eat the majority of carbohydrates early in the day, increasing protein throughout the day until you're eating mostly protein at the end of the day. And of course, all eating should stop within four to six hours of sleeping.