More craziness about food and health (Eating in a 6 hour window?!) NYTimes

I’ve been fascinated recently (as you may know, reader) with meals, modified fasting, weight management, meditation. I guess I’m turning into one of those hippie, birkenstock-wearing, health-food-pushing, “hey, just use lemon juice for that” doctors from from a too-cool-for-school non-metropolitan back-to-earth backwaters.

Not really.

I’m always interested in non-traditional ideas that maybe mainstream medicine has not yet embraced. Chrono-biology for instance (perhaps a future blog post). In short, I find that the ways of our healthcare system are perhaps too ego-centric and too shortsighted to encompass the breadth of human experience, and that maybe, just maybe, folks in other cultures have figured out smart, healthful things as well.

In this case, Michael Pollan, who re-popularized the old adage, appears to be right. Not only his original: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” but also “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.”

This NYTimes article refers to a book called The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute. One of the main ideas is to consider eating all your meals within a 6 hour window each day, guaranteeing your body an 18 hour fast, which apparently is a healthy and a cycle that your tissues and organs and body expect. It results in less weight gain, easier weight loss, and lots of other downstream benefits.