Regular bedtime may be linked to a healthier gut, study finds
Global News
There is a diverse community of microorganisms, like bacteria, viruses and fungi, living in the human gut that are essential to human health. And sleep may impact this community.
Changing your sleep schedule even slightly — like going to bed at 10 p.m. on weekdays, then at 11:30 p.m. on weekends — could potentially be linked to harmful gut bacteria that contribute to obesity and cardiovascular disease, according to a recent study.
The study, published Aug.2 in The European Journal of Nutrition, found that irregular sleep patterns caused by social jet lag (your body adjusting to a chronic shift in sleep patterns), may be linked to diet quality, inflammation and the makeup of your gut microbiome.
“We know that major disruptions in sleep, such as shift work, can have a profound impact on your health,” Wendy Hall, a registered nutritionist at King’s College London and author of the study, said in a press release.
“This is the first study to show that even small differences in sleep timings across the week seem to be linked to differences in gut bacterial species.”
There is a diverse community of microorganisms, like bacteria, viruses, yeasts and fungi, living in the human gut that are essential to human health. Disruptions in these microbiomes can have severe health impacts, explained Patricia Lakin-Thomas, professor of biology at York University in Toronto.
“We’ve only recently discovered how important they are and how they affect not just our digestion, but all kinds of other things in the body. We don’t really understand how they do that, but we’re finding these correlations … even impacts on mental health,” she said.
And sleep may be another piece of the puzzle.
In order to find how social jet lag may affect gut bacteria, the researchers from King’s College London in the U.K. analyzed a sample of 934 participants from the United Kingdom between June 2018 and May 2019. They collected and studied blood, stool and gut microbiome samples, along with glucose measurements, comparing people with irregular sleep patterns with those with a routine sleep schedule.