There’s a great episode of Seinfeld where Jerry tells his quirky next door neighbor, Kramer, to set his “mental alarm” – the thing he uses to determine when to wake up in the morning – to a certain time so Jerry can wake up a friend of his in the morning who’s running the New York City Marathon. To make a long story short, that night, the electricity went out, Kramer overslept and Jerry’s friend was late for the marathon. When Jerry asked Kramer about what happened to his mental alarm, Kramer simply responded, “I must have hit the snooze.”
But there may have been something more to the story regarding why Kramer’s mental alarm went on the fritz that day. His mental alarm may have been thrown off by what he ate that night, especially if it was something high in fat.
This “mental alarm,” or what’s more commonly referred to as the body’s biological clock, is something everyone has. It’s what tells us when to eat, when to sleep, when to wake up in the morning and assists in the body’s regulation of the metabolic process. But according to some researchers, who investigated whether or not diet can alter the body’s biological clock, their findings indicate a high fat diet may do that very thing, perhaps leading to serious health issues like obesity, hypertension or any number of metabolic disorders.
To determine whether or not diet could affect the body’s biological clock, researchers fed either a high or low fat diet to two groups of rats, followed by a day in which the rats fasted. What they found was that among the group of rats fed the high fat diet, adiponectin – a protein released by fat cells in the liver that help regulate the body’s metabolism and release of insulin – were delayed in their release. But those on the low fat diet, the proteins they released were comparably much higher than the rats whose diets were high in fat.
The implication here is that due to the diminished amount of adiponectin proteins circulating in the body, fatty acids aren’t being metabolized, meaning that fat isn’t being converted, meaning that fat is being stored rather than used for energy. This greatly increases the risk for obesity. But it goes deeper than that. Because adiponectin is so intricately involved in the body’s biological clock, sleep disorders may result, type II diabetes becomes a risk factor and various forms of heart disease, like atherosclerosis, may take shape.
The science has never been more resolute in what ought to be abundantly clear: avoiding high fat diets. Just as the economy is interconnected, where one thing leads to another, so too does one’s diet. A high fat diet doesn’t only affect the waistline – it affects our sleep/wake cycle, our ability to tell whether or not we’re full from eating and how at risk we are for disease. Begin to change your life for the better by avoiding diets high in fat…you’ll be amazed by the difference it will make in so many aspects of your life!
