Ancient types of wheat, like kamut, are put to the test for inflammation, blood sugar, and cholesterol control.  The number one killer in the United States and around the world is what we eat. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:15 in my video Friday Favorites: Are Ancient Grains Healthier?, our diet kills millions more than tobacco. What are the five most important things we can do to improve our diets, based on the single most comprehensive global study of the health impact of nutrition? Eat less salt, eat more nuts, eat more non-starchy vegetables, eat more fruit, and, finally ..read more

Exposure to bright light synchronizes the central circadian clock in our brain, whereas proper meal timing helps sync the timing of different clock genes throughout the rest of our body.    One of the most important breakthroughs in recent years has been the discovery of “peripheral clocks.” We’ve known for decades about the central clock—the so-called suprachiasmatic nucleus. It sits in the middle of our brain right above the place where our optic nerves cross, allowing it to respond to day and night. Now we also know there are semi-autonomous clocks in nearly every organ of our bod ..read more

NutritionFacts.org has so many free resources to help you on your journey to a healthier life. The Evidence-Based Eating Guide       The Evidence-Based Eating Guide: A Healthy Living Resource from Dr. Greger & NutritionFacts.org simplifies making the switch to a healthier lifestyle. It’s an easy-to-understand guide, bursting with information on eating more healthfully, including a breakdown of Dr. Greger’s Traffic Light Eating, tips for using his Daily Dozen Checklist, sample menus, and more. English Spanish Chinese   Daily Dozen Meal Planning Guid ..read more

The same meal eaten at the wrong time of day can double blood sugar. We’ve known for more than half a century that our glucose tolerance—the ability of our body to keep our blood sugars under control—declines as the day goes on. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:25 in my video How Circadian Rhythms Affect Blood Sugar Levels, if you hook yourself up to an IV and drip sugar water into your vein at a steady pace throughout the day, your blood sugars will start to go up at about 8:00 pm, even though you haven’t eaten anything and the infusion rate didn’t change. The same amount of sugar ..read more

Grape juice and whole grapes are put to the test for brain function, including cognitive decline in early Alzheimer’s. In 2010, the first controlled trial was published that examined how the brain responds to grape juice. It helped aged rats, but what about people? “Concord grape juice supplementation improves memory function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment”—or so says the title. The problem is that the study was funded by Welch’s, and, though the authors claim they have no financial interest in the outcome, that seems disingenuous. I mean, do they think Welch’s would ever fund ..read more

Why are calories eaten in the morning less fattening than calories eaten in the evening?  One reason calories consumed in the morning are less fattening than those eaten in the evening is that more calories are burned off in the morning due to diet-induced thermogenesis. That’s the amount of energy the body takes to digest and process a meal, given off in part as waste heat. If people are given the same meal in the morning, afternoon, or night, their body uses up about 25 percent more calories to process it in the afternoon than at night and about 50 percent more calories to digest it in ..read more

Harness the power of your circadian rhythms for weight loss by making breakfast or lunch your main meal of the day. In my last chronobiology video, we learned that calories eaten at breakfast are significantly less fattening than the same number of calories eaten at dinner, as you can see at 0:14 in my video Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, Dinner Like a Pauper, but who eats just one meal a day?  What about simply shifting our daily distribution of calories to earlier in the day? Israeli researchers randomized overweight and obese women into one of two isocaloric groups, meani ..read more

Raw garlic is compared to roasted, stir-fried, simmered, and jarred garlic. Garlic lowers blood pressure, regulates cholesterol, and stimulates immunity. I’ve talked before about its effect on heart disease risk factors, but what about immunity? Eating garlic appears to offer the best of both worlds, dampening the overreactive face of the immune system by suppressing inflammation while boosting protective immunity—for example, the activity of our natural killer cells, which our body uses to purge cells that have been stricken by viruses or cancer. “In World War II garlic was called ‘Russian Pe ..read more

A calorie is not a calorie. It isn’t only what you eat, but when you eat. Mice are nocturnal creatures. They eat during the night and sleep during the day. However, if you only feed mice during the day, they gain more weight than if they were fed a similar amount of calories at night. Same food and about the same amount of food, but different weight outcomes, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:18 in my video Eat More Calories in the Morning to Lose Weight, suggesting that eating at the “wrong” time may lead to disproportionate weight gain. In humans, the wrong time would presumably mea ..read more

Given the power of chronotherapy—how the same dose of the same drugs taken at a different time of day can have such different effects—it’s no surprise that chronoprevention approaches, like meal timing, can also make a difference. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for “elucidating molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock,” our internal clock. For billions of years, life on Earth evolved to a 24-hour cycle of light and dark, so it’s no surprise our bodies are finely tuned to that pattern. But, even when we’re in total darkness without any external time cues, our body to cycle in a ..read more