Your eating patterns could be throwing off your circadian rhythms. Biomedical sciences professor Phillip Karpowicz says this negatively affects your health specifically your gut health which could result in an increased risk of colorectal cancer.
Circadian rhythms are 24-hour physiological changes that include sleep-wake cycles, metabolic changes, hormone oscillations, and cycles of feeding-fasting. These are driven by the circadian clock, a molecular timer that enables our cells to anticipate daily events.
"Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer that is notably increasing in younger people," Dr. Karpowicz says. "It has been suggested that circadian disruption due to lifestyle contributes to this trend."
For his research, Karpowicz has received a three-year grant of nearly $500,000 as part of a partnership between the Cancer Research Society and Worldwide Cancer Research. With this grant, he and his team will focus on colorectal cancer.
"We previously found that the loss of circadian clock rhythms increased the formation of a tumour in a mouse model of colorectal cancer," he says.
"We have reason to believe that time-restricted feeding, a form of circadian nutrition where food is consumed according to optimal circadian rhythms, reduces tumour formation."
Ideally, he says, we are supposed to eat when we are awake and active and restrict eating to peak activity times.
"You've got this clock in your body telling you to be awake and telling your cells to time things according to your behaviour patterns, and if you synchronize your feeding patterns with those behaviour patterns then everything becomes very strong and well timed, and you are healthy because of that."
Karpowicz is working with post-doctoral researchers Vania Carmona Alcocer, Emily Varga, and graduate student Rachna Patel to study time restrictive feeding, a kind of intermittent fasting, in mice at a cellular level. They will look at the effect of nutrients in the digestive tract and the genetic changes that occur in response to that feeding.
"We need to know precisely what causes the cells to do respond to nutrient rhythms. It is not enough to know that it happens: we have to figure out exactly how it happens because that is how you build a drug or design a therapy around it. Having that information is needed to give you the power to improve it."
He adds that the circadian system's impact on cancer is relatively underappreciated.
"Cancer research tends to ignore circadian rhythms in experimental design and the interpretation of data, while in medicine activities such as shiftwork, travel, late-night snacking, and the use of smart screens are common not only in patients, but also health-care practitioners, even though these disrupt circadian rhythms," says Karpowicz.
"We found that if you lost the circadian rhythm, then you increase the amount of cancer that would occur normally."
Karpowicz is a WE-Spark core principal member. His research initially kicked off with a Seeds4Hope grant from Windsor Cancer Centre Foundation in 2015.
