This episode is a round 2 episode with none other than Dr. Satchin Panda of the Salk Institute! While discussion with Dr. Panda invariably leads to eating behaviors, his deep background in circadian biology always tends to lend new and insightful perspectives. There's a good reason for this! It's an area he has made deep contributions to, especially through the discovery of melanopsin, which is a photopigment found in the eye that, rather than forming images, is specialized for communicating information about time-of-day to the "master oscillator" of circadian rhythm, the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a Ph.D in biomedical science and expert on nutritional health. Her podcasts and other videos can be found at FoundMyFitness.com.

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On the first episode with Dr. Panda, we were introduced to a new paradigm for eating known as time-restricted eating. Time-restricted eating, on the surface, shares many characteristics with an idea many of you may be more familiar with known as intermittent fasting. The difference, however, is that Dr. Panda's concept of time-restricted feeding has some degree of focus on the effect of poorly timed consumption food (or even xenobiotics) can have on the subtle behavior of our tissues. At nearly two hours of dialog, this episode touches on a lot of material, but also has a special focus on practical implementation of time-restricted eating, featuring a few of the most frequent questions that came after the first conversation. To see a list of these questions, click the timeline tab above and look for timepoints with the heading "practical implementation." (SPOILER: Yes, we cover black coffee! )

"10-14 hours of fasting when we get up in the morning means that we have given our gut rest." - Dr. Satchin Panda

In addition to these important and very practical how-to tidbits, we dive into lots of interesting new territory as well, including...

• How human anecdote and animal evidence suggests time-restricted feeding may be especially useful for gut-related issues, including inflammatory bowel disease and acid reflux.
• The fascinating way Dr. Panda is using human anecdote from his trial to ask new scientific questions he wouldn't think to ask and then going back to animal data to figure it out and how this unique approach forms a sort of closed loop pattern: animal → human feedback → back to animal for mechanism.
• How labs doing caloric restriction research may have actually been reaping the benefits of time-restricted without realizing it as an incidental to their experimental design.
• The revelation that 70% of FDA drugs are subject to circadian effects and are either less effective or more effective at certain times of the day.
• The effect melatonin has on the pancreatic production of insulin and the insight this lends to why we should probably stop eating at least 2-3 hours before we go to bed.
• The bizarre way circadian rhythms affects everything from susceptibility to UV damage to recovery from surgery to cancer risk (at least if you think the World Health Organization knows what they're talking about).