People with obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure or high cholesterol are often advised to eat less and move more, but our new research suggests there is now another simple tool to fight off these diseases: restricting your eating time to a daily 10-hour window.

Studies done in mice and fruit flies suggest that limiting when animals eat to a daily window of 10 hours can prevent, or even reverse, metabolic diseases that affect millions in the U.S.

We are scientists – a cell biologist and a cardiologist – and are exploring the effects of the timing of nutrition on health. Results from flies and mice led us and others to test the idea of time-restricted eating in healthy people. Studies lasting more than a year showed that TRE was safe among healthy individuals. Next, we tested time-restricted eating in patients with conditions known collectively as metabolic syndrome. We were curious to see if this approach, which had a profound impact on obese and diabetic lab rats, can help millions of patients who suffer from early signs of diabetes, high blood pressure and unhealthy blood cholesterol.

A leap from prevention to treatment

It’s not easy to count calories or figure out how much fat, carbohydrates and protein are in every meal. That’s why using TRE provides a new strategy for fighting obesity and metabolic diseases that affect millions of people worldwide. Several studies had suggested that TRE is a lifestyle choice that healthy people can adopt and that can reduce their risk for future metabolic diseases.

However, TRE is rarely tested on people already diagnosed with metabolic diseases. Furthermore, the vast majority of patients with metabolic diseases are often on medication, and it was not clear whether it was safe for these patients to go through daily fasting of more than 12 hours – as many experiments require – or whether TRE will offer any benefits in addition to those from their medications.

In a unique collaboration between our basic science and clinical science laboratories, we tested whether restricting eating to a 10-hour window improved the health of people with metabolic syndrome who were also taking medications that lower blood pressure and cholesterol to manage their disease.

We recruited patients from UC San Diego clinics who met at least three out of five criteria for metabolic syndrome: obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, high level of bad cholesterol and low level of good cholesterol. The patients used a research app called myCircadianClock, developed in our lab, to log every calorie they consumed for two weeks. This helped us to find patients who were more likely to spread their eating out over the span of 14 hours or more and might benefit from 10-hour TRE.

We monitored their physical activity and sleep using a watch worn on the wrist. As some patients with bad blood glucose control may experience low blood glucose at night, we also placed a continuous glucose monitor on their arm to measure blood glucose every few minutes for two weeks.

Nineteen patients qualified for the study. Most of them had already tried standard lifestyle interventions of reducing calories and doing more physical activity. As part of this study, the only change they had to follow was to self-select a window of 10 hours that best suited their work-family life to eat and drink all of their calories, say from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Drinking water and taking medications outside this window were allowed. For the next 12 weeks

Timing is the medicine

After 12 weeks, the volunteers returned to the clinic for a thorough medical examination and blood tests. We compared their final results with those from their initial visit. The results, which we published in Cell Metabolism, were pleasantly surprising. We found most of them lost a modest amount of body weight, particularly fat from their abdominal region. Those who had high blood glucose levels when fasting also reduced these blood sugar levels. Similarly, most patients further reduced their blood pressure and LDL cholesterol. All of these benefits happened without any change in physical activity.

Reducing the time window of eating also had several inadvertent benefits. On average, patients reduced their daily caloric intake by a modest 8%. However, statistical analyses did not find strong association between calorie reduction and health improvement. Similar benefits of TRE on blood pressure and blood glucose control were also found among healthy adults who did not change caloric intake.

Nearly two-thirds of patients also reported restful sleep at night and less hunger at bedtime – similar to what was reported in other TRE studies on relatively healthier cohorts. While restricting all eating to just a six-hour window was hard for participants and caused several adverse effects, patients reported they could easily adapt to eating within a 10-hour span. Although it was not necessary after completion of the study, nearly 70% of our patients continued with the TRE for at least a year. As their health improved, many of them reported having reduced their medication or stopped some medication.

Despite the success of this study, time-restricted eating is not currently a standard recommendation from doctors to their patients who have metabolic syndrome. This study was a small feasibility study; more rigorous randomized control trials and multiple location trials are necessary next steps. Toward that goal, we have started a larger study on metabolic syndrome patients.

Although we did not see any of our patients go through dangerously low levels of glucose during overnight fasting, it is important that time-restricted eating be practiced under medical supervision. As TRE can improve metabolic regulation, it is also necessary that a physician pays close attention to the health of the patient and adjusts medications accordingly.

We are cautiously hopeful that time-restricted eating can be a simple, yet powerful approach to treating people with metabolic diseases.

they used the myCircadianClock app, and for the last two weeks of the study they also had the continuous glucose monitor and activity monitor.

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Avocado is abound with many health benefits, it is especially considered to be very good for heart, and a latest study attests the same. In a randomised, controlled feeding study, it was observed that eating one avocado a day was associated with lower levels of LDL (specifically small, dense LDL particles) and oxidised LDL in adults with overweight or obesity.

“We were able to show that when people incorporated one avocado a day into their diet, they had fewer small, dense LDL particles than before the diet,” said Penny Kris-Etherton, distinguished professor of nutrition, who added that small, dense LDL particles are particularly harmful to promoting plaque buildup in the arteries.

“Consequently, people should consider adding avocados to their diet in a healthy way like on whole-wheat toast or as a veggie dip,” added Kris-Etherton. Specifically, the study found that avocados helped reduce LDL particles that had been oxidised. Similar to the way oxygen can damage food — like a cut apple turning brown — the researchers said oxidation is also bad for the human body.

“A lot of research points to oxidation being the basis for conditions like cancer and heart disease,” Kris-Etherton said. “We know that when LDL particles become oxidized, that starts a chain reaction that can promote atherosclerosis, which is the build-up of plaque in the artery wall. Oxidation is not good, so if you can help protect the body through the foods that you eat, that could be very beneficial,” continued Kris-Etherton.

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While many doctors will prescribe medication to help patients suffering from high blood pressure (and those medications can be very effective), those tend to come with side effects. So in pursuit of avoiding less-than-pleasant side effects, many people have found success in natural remedies. And we’re not talking about natural remedies based on anecdotal evidence, like drinking funky tea or getting into meditation — we’re talking about simple changes to your lifestyle and diet.

Interestingly, high blood pressure typically shows no signs or symptoms, earning it the not-so-cheerful nickname of the “silent killer.” But if you or someone you know has been diagnosed with high blood pressure, there’s no reason to panic just yet. Read on for everything you need to know about high blood pressure and how to naturally manage the condition, which affects about 75 million adults in the U.S.

What Is High Blood Pressure?

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Washington: A recent study found that HIV-infected cells release vesicles that contain a viral protein called Nef, further damaging cholesterol metabolism and triggering inflammation in uninfected bystander cells.

HIV infects only a limited repertoire of cells expressing HIV receptors. But HIV infection is also associated with conditions involving the dysfunction of cells that cannot be infected by HIV, such as hardening of the arteries, dementia, kidney impairment, and certain heart problems.

These HIV-associated conditions persist even after the successful application of antiretroviral therapy when no virus is found in the blood. Many of these conditions involve impairments in cholesterol metabolism. In the new study published in the journal of PLOS Pathogens, researchers examined the mechanisms that may contribute to HIV-associated metabolic conditions.

The results showed that the HIV protein Nef is released from infected cells in vesicles that are then rapidly taken up by uninfected bystander white blood cells, impairing cholesterol metabolism in these cells.

This impairment caused the formation of excessive lipid rafts discrete lipid domains present in the external leaflet of the plasma membrane and the re-localisation of inflammatory receptors into rafts, triggering inflammation. The findings demonstrate how a single viral molecule released from infected cells into circulation may contribute to a range of pathogenic responses.

“Our study points to a common mechanism of various co-morbidities of HIV infection. This opens a possibility to target this mechanism using drugs affecting cholesterol metabolism to treat several comorbidities in people living with HIV,” said one of the researchers of the study, Dmitri Sviridov.

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