All through the night

19 November, 2010

The F1000 roving camera was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week (you can get a somewhat peculiar take on the proceedings from my friend Tideliar). Faculty Member Randy Nelson, of Ohio State University, spoke to Sarah Greene about his recent work published in PNAS, which uncovered a potentially disturbing link between light at night and obesity.¹

A calorie may not simply be a calorie

It’s not simply that your midnight snack habit is responsible for those extra inches around the waist: the modern curse of light pollution might have to shoulder some of the blame too.

3 thoughts on “All through the night”

Dennis Bittner says:

23 November, 2010 at 8:44 pm

If mice are nocturnail (Turek study), can data on weight gain from light/dark, active/inactive feeding cycles be extrapolated to humans?

Richard P. Grant says:

23 November, 2010 at 10:45 pm

I was thinking along those lines too, Dennis: unfortunately I didn’t have chance to look into it before pushing this live. However, I’ll see if I can get Randy’s take on it.

Richard P. Grant says:

24 November, 2010 at 11:49 am

Randy has kindly written back to me. Here’s what he says:

The fact that hamsters are nocturnal and we are naturally diurnal is one limitation of our study; however, artificial light at night is unnatural for humans and hamsters alike and has many of the same effects on the brain in both species. For example, light at night suppresses the secretion of melatonin, an important hormone that signals nighttime to the body and may affect mood, and this suppression occurs in both nocturnal and diurnal species. We are currently repeating these studies in a diurnal rat from Africa.

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