Ruth Patterson, Ph.D. on Time-Restricted Eating in Humans & Breast Cancer Prevention

Today's episode features Dr. Ruth Patterson, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Family Medicine and Public Health as well as Associate Director of Population Sciences and leader of the Cancer Prevention program at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. If you enjoyed my last episode with Dr. Satchin Panda, I have good news! This will also be a great episode for you, since we talk about some similar ideas, but focus more on the human side of things, especially when it comes to time-restricted eating, since Dr. Patterson does primarily clinical research.

In this 45-minute podcast, we talk about...

• The importance of time-restricted eating as a practical public health intervention, mostly for it's ease of implementation, that may have a widespread impact on disease risk.
• Why you should probably make sure your time-restricted eating window occurs earlier in the day, rather than later.
• How the first 5% drop in weight loss can have disproportionately large effects on the metabolic factors associated with breast cancer risk when compared with subsequent weight loss.
• The association of longer fasting durations beginning earlier in the evening and improved sleep in humans, as well as spontaneous physical activity in their day-to-day lives.
• The relationship between metabolism and breast cancer risk.
• The effect of lifestyle factors, such as obesity, physical activity, what and even when you eat, whether or not you smoke tobacco... and how even modest changes, such as consuming food earlier in the day and only during an 11-hour window, can decrease breast cancer risk and recurrence by as much as 36%.
• The importance of starting your fast earlier in the evening, and how an earlier eating window has been shown to correlate to reductions in inflammatory markers.
• The association of higher circulating insulin levels with breast cancer risk, and how insulin itself has an important relationship with estrogen by affecting the levels of sex-hormone binding globulin.
• The dangers of having a cellular environment that is inflamed, as the case is with the obese, and simultaneously having elevated cellular growth signals, which is also characteristic of the hormonal milieu of the obese.
• The surprisingly small role heredity plays in determining overall risk of breast cancer when compared to lifestyle factors.
• How healthful lifestyle habits, like choosing to eat during the right window, ultimately helps us trend our risk for many of the diseases of old age in the correct direction instead of influencing only one or another.

If the concept of time-restricted eating especially piques your interest, make sure to...

1. Check out the podcast released just prior to this one: Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass & Heart Health.
2. Make sure your data points go to good use! Visit myCircadianClock.org to learn how you can, by committing to a minimum of a 14 week "intervention" and submitting pictures of your food from your iPhone or Android phone, move human research on time-restricted eating forward.

Huge special thanks to Dr. Ruth Patterson for coming on. Enjoy the podcast!