When you eat can promote weight loss and fight diabetes, researchers find

"Researchers have long noted that shift workers -- folks like nurses, security personnel and others on the night shift -- are extremely prone to developing metabolic syndrome, a pre-diabetic condition marked by insulin resistance, weight gain around the middle and high cholesterol levels. But why? Do they tend to simply eat too many snacks as they try to stay alert at night or is it related to disruption of the circadian clock, the body's internal master clock in the brain that's set by light exposure? Turns out, according to new research by scientists at the Salk Institute, there's probably another crucial factor: not only is what you eat important to health but when you eat appears to be crucial to weight control and healthy metabolism.

In experiments with mice, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered there's a daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver, the organ that's the body's metabolic clearinghouse. And this revving up and slowing down is primarily controlled not just by food intake and not by the body's circadian clock, as was previously assumed...

The Salk researchers' findings, which are set for publication in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are at an unusually high risk for metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity."