How are circadian Rhythms impacting the microbiome and how to respect your body clock for optimal health.
Circadian rhythms are light-dark cycles, as old as the first life on Earth. All life had to be intimately connected to cycles of the sun for evolution.
Daily eating cycles, sleeping cycles, and seasonal harvest cycles are all critical to optimal health and we now see modern science is finally starting to recognize the importance of optimizing these cycles.
Circadian Rhythms + the Microbiome
Gut microbes play an important role in nearly every aspect of health: they are responsible for mood, behavior, cognitive function, immunity, blood sugar regulation, digestion, detox, and much more.
Interestingly, gut bacteria are significantly altered when we go out of sync with circadian rhythms.
It is now widely accepted that we have many internal clocks. There are clocks for every organ, and these organs have been following circadian rhythms, switching on and off for millions of years of evolution.
If we chronically eat late at night and we have a two-million-year-old clock that says we should eat in the day, science points to a disturbance in microbes driving healthy mind and body function. By ignoring internal clocks, the body, its microbes, and even its genes lose ability to sync up with circadian rhythms that have been with us since the beginning of life on the planet.
Loss of circadian gene expression as a result of disrupted ability for genes to listen to or connect with rhythms of nature has been linked to a number of progressive and life-threatening health ailments.