Dhru Purohit Show
Supercharge Your Sleep and Improve Your Longevity Using the Power of Intermittent Fasting & Circadian Biology (Rebroadcast)
05 Mar 2025
This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge and Momentous. We used to think circadian rhythm only applied to sleep. But emerging science has revealed a link between our circadian rhythm and metabolism, cognition, risk for chronic diseases, and many other crucial aspects of our health. Our biology was designed to live in sync with a natural light-dark cycle, but modern-day society has disrupted this natural balance. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes with Dr. Satchin Panda. Dr. Panda dives deep into his groundbreaking circadian biology research and shares how leveraging your circadian rhythm can dramatically improve your sleep, lower your risk of chronic disease, and improve your cognitive function. They also discuss how time-restricted eating, exercise, and light can be used to help program your circadian rhythm and why it’s especially important for shift workers to take advantage of these tools. Dr. Panda is pioneering circadian biology research. He is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a Pew Biomedical Scholar, founder of the UC San Diego Center for Circadian Biology, and recipient of the Julie Martin Mid-Career Award in Aging Research. Dr. Panda has spoken at conferences around the world about his work on circadian rhythms and diabetes, including Diabetes UK, the American Diabetes Association, the Danish Diabetes Association, and the professional diabetes societies of Europe and Australia. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Panda dive into: Why late-night eating is so detrimental to our health (2:15) Organ systems that have a circadian rhythm (8:24) Common ailments that could be related to circadian rhythm disturbances (14:11) Night-shift work and cancer risk (20:19) How poor sleep perpetuates bad food choices (27:00) What happens in the body when you rely on an alarm clock (44:01) Why you need to accumulate sleep debt for better sleep (51:25) Time-restricted eating and sleep (1:00:40) How to combat fragmented sleep (1:15:35) The best time to work out (1:55:50) The link between exercise and cancer (2:07:55) Positive changes for better sleep health on a global scale (2:17:20) Strategies for night-shift workers to combat circadian rhythm disruption 02:45:10) Dr. Panda’s research in firefighters (2:48:46) Tips for optimizing your circadian rhythm (3:14:20) Where to follow and support Dr. Panda's work (3:27:50) Also mentioned in this episode: The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight The Circadian Diabetes Code: Discover the Right Time to Eat, Sleep, and Exercise to Prevent and Reverse Prediabetes and Diabetes Download the MyCircadianClock app Try This: 6 Crazy Facts About Sleep Try This: How Exercise Helps Fight Cancer For more on Dr. Satchin Panda, follow him on Twitter @SatchinPanda, Instagram @satchin.panda, or his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge and Momentous. Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Dr. Sachin Panda, welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to have you here. I wanna jump right in. Tell us about why when we eat, which is the timing of when we decide to eat, the window, might be just as important, if not more important, then what we eat.
Circadian rhythm essentially relates to almost a daily timetable of things that has to happen in our body, whether it is fighting infection, metabolic balance, brain health. or even repair and rejuvenation for injuries. And when we think about circadian rhythm, then since it's a big new concept, it's also a little bit difficult to understand.
But just imagine that in our life, daily life, we organize our life around time. We think of the whole day, what time I have to get up, what time I have to go to school or send kids to school, and then what time I go to work, what do I do, and then in the evening, what time I have to meet friends or get back to home, what time we sleep.
So similarly, every single cell in our body has its own 24-hour timetable. That means the cell has to decide, okay, this is the time I have to make energy. This is the time when I have to recycle. This is the time to divide and rejuvenate.
So this is a very new concept in science, and this has the potential to impact our daily habits, and it has the potential to increase efficacy of medications that we take or supplements that we take on a daily basis.
And also what we're seeing now, there are also new drugs that are based on circadian rhythm to essentially based on the idea that as we get older or in many diseases, our circadian clocks are disrupted. And the question is, if we can fix our clock with a new drug, can we also fix a disease? So these are the three big principles that are coming into play.
And you mentioned time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting. That's kind of one aspect of this circadian rhythm biology. But this is actually one way to get into the science because once we understand why we should be eating in less than 12 hours and why that has to be consistent for the science behind it, then we can dissect a little more into the interrelated parts of fasting, sleep,
what time we should be exposed to light, when we should exercise, and that will give us kind of a nice toolbox for each one of us to adopt.
Absolutely. So what I'm hearing you say is big picture, the most important thing to understand, and it has all sorts of applications, including when to eat, when to sleep, when to be active, when to potentially take a drug, as you mentioned. People are on pharmaceutical interventions, so it's most efficacious and effective for the body.
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