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Late dinner damages memory

08.12.2014

Even someone who has never had problems with excess weight knows that "you can not eat after six." Late dinner, especially if it has become a habit, is fraught with metabolic disorders that can lead to overweight and type XNUMX diabetes. A year ago, experts from Vanderbilt University (USA) suggested that it was all about the disruption of the biological clock: a disrupted circadian rhythm causes cells to begin absorbing nutrients at any time, which leads to fat accumulation, insulin resistance, etc., up to the aforementioned diabetes.

However, food out of time harms not only the actual metabolic processes, but also higher nervous activity. Christopher Colwell, along with colleagues from the University of California at Los Angeles, decided to test how the behavior of mice would change if they were fed at the wrong time. Mice are active at night, but they usually sleep during the day, so the researchers tried to adjust the daily schedule of laboratory mice in accordance with their natural schedule. Some animals were fed when they were awake, while others were fed only during the day, that is, at clearly inopportune times. The mice quickly knew when to expect food, and they themselves woke up to eat.

It should be emphasized that, despite the changed daily routine, their time for sleep did not decrease. That is, although some mice did not eat according to the rules, then they slept the same time as their "colleagues" who lived according to the correct schedule. This means that if it were possible to find any anomalies in behavior, then the reason for this would not at all be a lack of sleep in itself.

Before knocking down the daily routine of the mice, they were placed in a cage with some two objects so that the animals examined and remembered them. After "reprogramming" the animals again found themselves in a cage with two objects, one of which was supposed to be familiar to them (they saw it before the start of the experiment), and the other was not. Ordinary mice, fed at the right time, paid little attention to a familiar subject, but intensively studied another, unfamiliar one. On the contrary, those who were fed at odd hours seemed to forget that they had already seen one of the objects, and studied both with equal zeal.

In another version of the experiment, the animals were frightened, after which they were again placed in the environment where they had to experience fear. The results were similar: the mice with the changed daily schedule experienced less fear the second time, forgetting what they had to endure here. In addition, it turned out that eating at the wrong time impairs learning - those who were fed incorrectly spent more time remembering something, compared with mice living on a normal schedule. The results of the experiments, the researchers reported at the latest annual conference of the Neuroscience Society in Washington.

A similar memory impairment is known to occur in jet lag, or jet lag, and in this case deterioration has been observed in both mice and humans. Obviously, both with jet lag and with late dinner, there is a failure of the biological clock, which leads to similar consequences. However, it is worth emphasizing that in the above work, the experiments were performed on mice. Perhaps the same thing happens with you and me, however, the results will still have to be confirmed in "human" studies.

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