Fat Mouse, Thin Mouse

Our little pilot store and physical office are closed on Mondays, mainly because we run a mostly virtual company anyway, and the store's open the other six days of the week. That also means Monday is supposed to be my "day off", but I find myself sitting here at the office waiting for a delivery. Bloody tedious.

So I'm wrestling with being productive or not, and right now 'not' is winning so I thought I'd share this little piece of advice with you...

It's not so much what you eat that makes you fat, as when you eat it.

The basic proposition is that you can eat whatever you like during the daytime and not gain weight. It's got something to do with the way the body decides what to do with the food you eat.

People who need to get out more figured it out by looking at shift workers. That's because workers transferred to shiftwork inexplicably gain weight, even though neither the type, quality nor quanity of food they eat changes.

To test the proposition, a researcher in Japan ran an amazing experiment with little white mice.

He divided them into two groups, one fed during the day time, and the other fed at night. In every other respect, the mice were the same... the same activity level, the same amount of sleep, the same food, same little mouse exercise wheel... the only thing that was different was the time they ate.

And after just 3 days (not 30 days, or 3 weeks... THREE DAYS), he weighed the mice. The little daytime mice weighed in at a healthy 35g each. That's normal weight for these fellas. But the night fed mice weighed 40g each, an incredible 15% more than their day-fed cousins. In just 3 days.

Then they ran some blood tests and isolated a hormone that we all secrete at night that sends a signal to your body's insulin and fat receptors to tell them to store excess nutrients as fat (because without that message, those excess nutrients just get filtered back out of your system). When they switched that hormone off and repeated the experiment on a new batch of mice, there was no difference between them.

It makes some sense. In a time when food was not plentiful, there would be a real survival advantage for any animal that was able to store away whatever nutrients it hadn't used by the end of the day. That's great, unless you live in a rich western country like Australia, the USA, Canada or most of Europe where food is plentiful, cheap and easy to get.

So the moral of the story is... next time you head for the fridge at 2am, just remember where that slice of cold pizza’s going to end up.