I'm a doctor and want everyone over 30 years old to stop eating after 7pm
Dr Poonam Desai, a former ER doctor who specialises in preventative health, says late-night meals wreak havoc on the metabolism, disrupt hormones, and set you up for morning sugar spikes that leave you feeling tired and hungry.
'When you eat after 7pm, you may convert calories into fat faster than you ever thought,' Dr Desai, a hormone and nutrition specialist, explained in an Instagram post.
That's because melatonin - your sleep hormone - doesn't play well with insulin, the hormone that helps regulate blood sugar.
Together, she says, these hormones create 'a recipe for trouble' when it comes to late-night eating - and men and women over 30 are more sensitive to it.
Eating late forces your metabolism into overdrive, raising your heart rate and body temperature.
This not only affects your waistline, but also makes it almost impossible to fall into deep, restorative sleep.
Without that, your body misses crucial repair time, leaving you feeling drained and unproductive the next day.
The melatonin-insulin clash can also cause you to wake up starving because poor sleep raises ghrelin, the hormone that tells you you're hungry, while lowering leptin, which signals fullness.
'You wake up craving unhealthy foods, and the cycle begins all over again,' Dr Desai said.
Research shows poor sleep can cause a 23 per cent increase in morning blood sugar levels due to cortisol - your stress hormone.
Late-night eating also keeps cortisol elevated, which can promote belly fat and disrupt your body's circadian rhythm, particularly when combined with screen time and low daylight exposure.
Hence, Dr Desai says late dinners often spiral into Netflix binges, poor sleep, hormone chaos, weight gain and frustration.
But the fix can be surprisingly simple.
'Clients who close their kitchen at 7pm often find they shed fat more effectively and get much better sleep,' she said.
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The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘On call for brain retrievals': the man who gets American football players examined for CTE after death
Shortly after news broke that a shooter had breached the New York City skyscraper where the NFL is headquartered and killed four people before turning the gun on himself, Chris Nowinski was called to duty. A former Harvard football player and professional wrestler turned neuroscientist, Nowinski helped establish the Unite Brain Bank at Boston University. It is the world's largest repository of brain samples dedicated to the study of CTE – or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive neurodegenerative disease linked to repetitive hits to the head and concussions. Some 1,600 brains have been examined there, with Nowinski helping to facilitate donations. In his suicide note, 27-year-old Shane Tamura of Las Vegas asked for his brain to be studied for CTE, which can only be diagnosed posthumously. Tamura was a former high school football player, and he claimed the sport gave him the incurable brain injury. Nowinski is following the case closely, preparing for the possibility that BU might acquire Tamura's brain. While he and the general public awaits the results of the New York medical examiners office's criminal autopsy (the office declined to provide a timeline), he spoke with the Guardian about how the Brain Bank procures former athletes' brains and what the NFL did to make the uproar around CTE go away. What was your initial reaction to the news? It was very troubling to learn about his suicide note. He clearly understood some aspects of the concussion and CTE discussion. But with what he did, he was not of sound mind, so you wonder if this was something that he latched on to as part of his psychosis. How would you categorize Tamura's case? At least from a violence standpoint, it feels like it belongs on the same spectrum with Phillip Adams and Aaron Hernandez – both former NFL players who committed murder before killing themselves. We've seen this enough over the years to know there are three categories: there's a chance that there's no pathological brain damage, that this has nothing to do with any history of playing football. There's a chance this has nothing to do with CTE, but he did take enough hits that he suffered concussions or subclinical traumatic brain injury that contributed to his symptoms, and that those symptoms contributed to his actions. And then there's the chance that he had CTE – and then that sort of splits into, did he have enough CTE where we might think it contributed to his actions or not? You helped establish the Unite Brain Bank at Boston University, where the bulk of CTE research is conducted. What does the process of pursuing a brain for science look like? We don't usually go into specifics, but what I can tell you is that my job is to track down cases that are of public interest – and this case certainly qualifies. In a case like this where there's an ongoing investigation, the brain is basically under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. It's their call whether or not it's studied and whether it's studied in-house or externally. But I also know the people involved with the New York City medical examiner's office have a tremendous reputation and tremendous capabilities internally, so there's no concern that [Tamura's] brain won't be studied. What happens to the deceased after a criminal investigation has concluded? Like in the case of Hernandez, who died in penal custody? There is a time when the investigation is over that, in theory, the brain tissue then becomes property of the family. How does one go about convincing a family to make a donation to the Brain Bank, especially in tragic situations such as Tamura's or Hernandez's? At this stage, after 1,600 brains, one thing our team all agrees upon is that there's no case so important [as] to upset a family. If they're not comfortable or on the fence, they're never pressured. We offer it as an opportunity if they want to. What can the process of donating a brain look like for most families? Most will call the 24-hour Boston University CTE center hotline. The person who responds to the call usually has a network of medical experts across the country who are essentially on call for brain retrievals. They coordinate when the brain retrieval will occur – could be at a hospital or a funeral home. The expert procures the brain and then either a courier is hired to fly it to Boston or it will be [preserved] for weeks to harden and then transferred to Boston. BU says online that it's able to make extractions while also allowing for families to have open-casket funerals. How? The person retrieving the brain goes through the back of the skull. Ten years ago, football's CTE crisis was headline news and an inescapable controversy for the NFL. Why did the outrage recede? I'll give you three insights: one is that when the NFL stopped denying the game caused CTE, it took some of the energy out. It stopped there being a clear bad guy in the story. Two is the sports industry has benefited from the fracturing of media. There just aren't that many full-time investigative journalists in sports anymore. Then point three is you can't get this issue on television anymore, and that's primarily because the NFL has now given a game to every media platform. It's not even a well-kept secret that anybody who carries game broadcasts is very concerned about [not calling attention to] CTE in the NFL. [Days after this interview, the NFL announced it had bought a 10% stake in ESPN.] I can remember there being some urgency to establish a link between CTE and violence – but all the research at the time was inconclusive. Has anything changed? I still wouldn't say there's been a definitive study. Frankly, it's very difficult to answer the question of CTE and violence through Brain Bank studies, because the data it produces comes from talking to families [after the subject dies]. It is true that a larger proportion of men with CTE than you would like had become violent with loved ones. But it's difficult to study the appearance and disappearance of the violence in part because a lot of people with CTE became violent midlife and then less so as dementia set in. So that will need to be studied longitudinally. But if you ask me: am I aware of people [who played contact sports] who are considered the nicest guys in the world suddenly in their 50s and 60s becoming violent with their loved ones? I have a lot of those stories. The NFL is quite proud of the rules changes they have enacted to make pro football safer – and to its credit the updates have taken a lot of hits out of the game. But what about the levels below, like college and high school? Can we point to a reduction in potential brain injuries? Firstly, the NFL had to take the brain injury risk seriously because there's a [players] union. But that doesn't exist in college. We did an editorial recently to accompany a study that showed basically that 80% of the NFL's concussions are in games; in college, it's 30% [meaning the overwhelming majority happen during practice]. The editorial laid out how the NFL set the tone 10 years ago by virtually eliminating hits in practice. The reality is I'm glad the NFL has started making some stronger changes – most recently, to kickoff procedures. No one was dying for that, but now we're all fine with it. But the sad part is the other levels aren't copying the NFL. Like, how is the NFL proving that it's safer, but college and high school football aren't even talking about it? In high school, apart from two states that have severe limits, everybody else has pretty loose limits, no monitoring and no penalties. I'm having that battle on a daily basis to warn athletes, especially the ones who are old enough to understand, that they're not being warned and their coaches are not properly educated on CTE. So for all the good things that have happened, slowly progressing the discussion, we should not expect CTE to go down. We're still creating the same problem; we just feel better about it. Personally, it always rankles me to hear announcers complain about roughness penalties that strike them as overzealous. Then you realize safety is an afterthought to the business – that if the changes are too radical and fans turn off the TV, the hitting comes back. And I don't have a problem with that at the NFL level. Players get half the revenue, so they can have that discussion about how safe they want it to be. But we also have to educate the fans to allow it to be safer. The one place where that's actually happened is professional wrestling. Now that fans understand the risks, they want matches to be stopped when people have concussions. Even now you see wrestling fans struggle to play back old matches because it's so obvious how dazed some of those guys were in the ring. I had that discussion with a 25-year-old who works for a sports organization in the brain health space who was like, 'I watched some matches from your era. What the hell were you guys doing?' So, we could educate NFL fans too to enjoy a slightly safer game. But who wants to be reminded that many of the guys they're watching already have CTE? Given that the NYC shooting happened during NFL training camps, I was surprised that players didn't have more to say about it. Current NFL players don't talk about CTE because many of them don't understand it and others know they'll be punished if they do. I mean, let's be honest: Jerry Jones [owner of the Dallas Cowboys] is still on the record saying he doesn't believe that football causes CTE even though he's lost a teammate from Arkansas to it. So if you play for the Cowboys and start talking about CTE, I wouldn't be surprised if he cut you the next day. Ten years ago there was a lot of talk about the need for a test to detect CTE in the living. Are we any closer to that? Yes. We've learned tau Pet scans for Alzheimer's disease don't work. But we have identified targets we think might make it diagnosable from blood, and we are trying two more new tau Pet tracers that people are hopeful might work for CTE. Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Guardian
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In doing so, they risk endangering millions of people and kickstarting a doom loop of mistrust from which it could take decades to recover. As usual, the Trump administration's stance on vaccines is motivated less by sincere populism and more by personal profit. Before Kennedy launched his own presidential campaign on a platform of 'making America healthy again', he earned $20,000 every week helming a non-profit dedicated to fostering vaccine skepticism. Now in the cabinet, he has fired the entire CDC vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a ragtag crew, half of whom have never published peer-reviewed research on vaccines. Just last week, Kennedy cancelled $500m of federal funding for mRNA vaccines, which prevented 14m deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic. And he has made these rollbacks while retaining a financial stake in ongoing litigation against a vaccine manufacturer. All the while, the US has seen more than 1,300 measles cases and three deaths this year. 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Budget cuts can be reversed, but trust may be more difficult to recover. Long before RFK Jr's ascendancy, disasters like the CDC's infamous Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee and the Food and Drug Administration's glacial response to the Aids crisis cast long shadows over public health institutions. Today, a plurality of Americans are already predicting they will lose faith in medical guidance under the current administration. That would undermine the very basis of public health, which depends on people choosing to follow guidelines grounded in research they did not personally conduct and whose results they are ill-trained to parse. Repairing that breach will require years of effortful relationship-building, but it might also require rallying Americans with the classic tactic of patriotism. For all of Trump's bellicose rhetoric, he misses that our nation's most extraordinary scientific and medical advances have drawn bipartisan enthusiasm in part because they reinforced a perceived American exceptionalism. At the height of the cold war, RFK Jr's uncle chose to go to the moon, and Richard Nixon brought that dream to fulfilment. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Americans helped fund it by mailing in more than 2.5m dimes, hence its christening as the March of Dimes. That money supported Jonas Salk's development of the polio vaccine. Within two years of its introduction, annual cases of polio had fallen by 90%. Even Trump, who botched the initial response to Covid-19, managed to oversee the historic Operation Warp Speed. If only he could recognize that this is the kind of achievement which makes America great.
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an hour ago
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Gunman in CDC attack fired over 180 shots at building and broke 150 windows
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