Professor Russell Foster

speaker

92 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Feb

Professor Russell Foster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · Recap: The hidden clock controlling your health | Professor Russell Foster · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

And we're just sort of working our way forward.

We do know, for example, that the classic sort of rhythmic change in metabolism that you see is if you cut the nervous connections to key organs, such as the liver, for example, then the rhythmic changes in the liver don't occur.

So we know that the neural connections are very important.

But it's not the only thing.

There are other chemical messengers.

And what's emerged, I think, over the past few years is the appreciation that our sort of emotional responses, our cognitive responses and our physiology and health.

can be profoundly affected by not doing the right thing at the right time.

So in terms of emotional responses, we see fluctuations in mood, irritability, loss of empathy.

We fail to pick up the social signals from other individuals and we lose empathy.

Risk-taking and impulsivity will do stupid and unreflective things when we're not synchronized.

We also, combined with sleep loss, the brain

forgets the positive experiences and remembers the negative ones.

So circadian rhythm disruption and sleep loss means that you're basing your decisions upon your negative rather than your positive memories, which I think is so important.

And then of course, you know, you can slide into using excessive amounts of caffeine to keep you awake and then trying to reverse that when you want to go to sleep with excessive alcohol.

There's the failure to multitask, your concentration goes, your communication, your decision-making skills all fall apart, and you, again, lose social connectivity.

So those are the short-term things that many of us have experienced to some degree.

But what you get in long-term night shift workers, and indeed individuals such as long-haul pilots and air crew, are sort of this sort of cardiovascular problems, heart disease, for example, altered stress responses,

Lowered immunity.

One really interesting set of studies showing that with multiple time zone crosses, the immune system is disrupted and you're less able to fight off bacterial infection, for example.

And it may be the basis for why there are higher rates of cancer in long-term night shift workers.

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