The Programmer's Diet :) [Archive] - thinBasic: Basic Programming Language Community Forum

LanceGary

22-10-2010, 11:34

http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/food-drink/top-five-bad-foods-that-are-actually-good-for-you-blog-14-real-buzz.html

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/geek-diet-and-exercise-programs.html

Intersting. The article below suggests that exposure to artificial light (all those hours working at night) might make programmers fat.

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Does light make you fat?
When—not just what—mice eat affects how much weight they put on
Oct 14th 2010

THE blame for rising obesity rates has been pinned on many things,
including a more calorific diet, the spread of processed food, a lack
of exercise and modern man’s generally more stressful lot. Something
else may soon be included in the list: brighter nights.

Light regulates the body’s biological clock—priming an individual’s
metabolism for predictable events such as meals and slumber. Previous
research has shown that, in mice at least, the genes responsible for
this can be manipulated so as to make the animals plumper and more
susceptible to problems associated with obesity, including diabetes
and heart disease. It was not known, though, whether simply altering
ambient light intensity might have similar effects.

A team of researchers led by Laura Fonken of Ohio State University has
cleared the matter up. As they report in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, they examined how nocturnal light
affects weight, body fat and glucose intolerance (the underlying cause
of late-onset diabetes) in male mice. They found that persistent
exposure to even a little night-time light leads to increases in all
three.

To reach this conclusion Dr Fonken split her murine subjects into
three groups. Some were kept in cages lit constantly, so as to
resemble a never-ending overcast day. A second group lived in
conditions akin to their natural habitat, with 16 hours of overcast
day-like light, followed by eight hours of darkness. The remaining
rodents were also exposed to a cycle, but the dark was replaced with a
dim glow equivalent to the twilight at the first flickers of dawn.

Over the eight-week period of the experiment the mice in the first and
third groups gained almost 50% more weight than those exposed to the
natural light-dark cycle. They also put on more fat and exhibited
reduced tolerance of glucose, despite eating comparable amounts of
food and moving around just as much.

The only thing that seemed to differ was when the mice ate. In the
wild, mice are nocturnal. Unsurprisingly, then, those in the quasi-
natural conditions consumed only about a third of their food in the
“day” phase. For a mouse exposed to the twilight cycle, however, the
figure was over 55%.

In a follow-up experiment, Dr Fonken looked at whether the timing of
food consumption alone could explain the observed differences. It
turned out that those forced to eat during the “day”—ie, out of whack
with their biological clock—did indeed gain about 10% more weight than
those fed at “night” (be it dark or just dim) or those with
uninterrupted access to grub.

How this might relate to people will require further investigation.
Mice and humans are physiologically alike, so a similar effect might
be expected for people, but the fact that mice are nocturnal and
humans diurnal is a serious complicating factor. It is true, though,
that the spread of electric lighting means many people eat their main
meal when natural daylight is long gone—the obverse of a mouse eating
during daylight hours. And that tendency to eat late, though it has
never been tested properly, is believed by many nutritionists to be a
factor in putting on weight.

When the full explanation for the modern epidemic of obesity has
emerged, it is unlikely that the spread of artificial lighting will be
the whole of it. But this work suggests it might be a part. When you
eat could be as important as what you eat.

Science and Technology

http://www.economist.com/node/17248910