It turns out that nutritional medicine may have to be rewritten. Firstly, due to genetic predisposition, because healthy eating is something different for everyone, and secondly, because of two further key issues.
The first of these is insulin. Insulin is what the pancreas secretes when we eat and digest something.
The other is chronobiology, i.e. timing: When do we eat what? And that’s what is so intriguing, the fact that we have to pay attention to two distinct aspects. First of all, what causes insulin to be secreted? There are a few things here that we simply have to reformulate. Quite a lot has gone wrong on this front in recent years. And the second aspect is quite crucial: at what time of the day should we eat which foods? That’s because the pancreas reacts in different ways depending on the time of day. And this is regardless of our individual daily routine. The science of chronobiology is the science of the body clock.
We humans have time slots for certain wake and sleep phases. We have time slots in which we regenerate ourselves. We have time slots to metabolize certain substances or to consume certain foods. To this extent, we now know when the body is doing what. It’s about the time of day we engage in sport or sit down to eat. Nowadays, we generally manage quite well on this score and are able, for example, to get on top of an existing diabetes condition – that’s partly why this has become so well known. It’s about controlling the pancreas in such a way that it fulfills its chronobiological function. This essentially means carbohydrates in the morning, a balanced diet at lunchtime and mainly protein intake in the evening. At the same time, the genetics of the individual have to be taken into account – which protein, which carbohydrates, etc. We know that, as long as the individual broadly complies with this diet, weight gain can be almost ruled out and the momentum towards diabetes can be halted.
