Did you know there is a biological clock that is inheritent to our muscles and independent of the central (brain) clock that responds to light? Neither did I until recently.
This muscle clock is sensitive to a few things, in particular, feeding and exercise.
In mice (mice are active at night and sleep during the day), providing food only at night changed their activity patterns such that they awoke 15 min before feeding time in anticipation of food. Great, so it interrupted their sleep, right?
Actually, following 4 weeks of this feed protocol the mice lost muscle function. In isolated muscle fibers from these mice, they actually did not produce as much force irregardless of stimulus (either electrical or via calcium).
What Esser et al. found was that the contractile proteins of the mice fed 1/2 way through sleep actually mutated (in a not good way).
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What you see on the right is a normal cross sectional area, and on the left you see the fillaments do not align in the normal 1:8 ratio.
I'll see if I can dig up the primary research papers from the talk. It was quite interesting, and though I have never supported the idea of eating half way through sleep to increase protein...has changed my ideas regarding eating a big meal before bed.
Br