Bayou Health | Balancing Circadian Rhythms with Locally Grown Food

BY SHANNON DAHLUM, FDNP 

November is upon us, which means the sweet peaches and juicy watermelons we enjoyed not long ago are gone until next summer. In their place, our local farms and gardens offer up an abundance of winter squashes, broccoli, leafy greens, carrots, green beans and potatoes.

Thanksgiving is, of course, a celebration of this autumnal harvest. It’s a holiday centered around expressing our appreciation for the food provided by the land we live on at this time of year, before growth vastly slows down over the course of the winter months.

Centering our meal around food that is locally grown and currently in season in our environment is a practice we should prioritize not only at Thanksgiving, but throughout the year. Purchasing produce from small scale local growers supports sustainable environmental practices and our local economy. The produce grown close to home is harvested at or near peak ripeness, which means those vegetables and fruits have had the chance to develop a richer vitamin and mineral profile than their counterparts which were picked well in advance of ripeness and shipped thousands of miles to get to the produce aisle in our grocery stores. If you’ve ever compared the flavor and texture of a freshly picked tomato from someone’s backyard to one picked out of a bin in the grocery store, the stark difference in quality is evident. Another benefit to eating locally raised produce throughout the year that you may not be aware of, is how it helps to support your innate biological clock, or circadian rhythm.

As Mother Nature shifts through the seasons, so does your body’s physiology. Your microbiome and metabolism are fluid, and they adapt to the environmental changes around you, ensuring that your digestion and energy production match what is currently needed.

Shorter days mean that your body is expending less energy on physical activity, and energy moves inward. The extended darkness signals the production of more melatonin, which supports longer sleep, enabling your body to spend less energy on physical activity and more on cellular clean up and internal restoration. While the long, hot days of summer are for physical activity and gathering energy from the abundance of sweeter, more carbohydrate dense foods around us, the darker days of winter are for resting, detoxifying, and cleaning up the body’s internal environment. If we follow the signals of Mother Nature, we naturally maintain a healthy balance of cleansing and rebuilding. These signals that Mother Nature provides for us come from the amount of sunshine that enters our eyes and brushes our skin, and also through the sunshine that enters our guts from the foods we eat.

Plants get their energy directly from the sun. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants transform the sun’s energy into sugar, or carbohydrates, for their own energy. When we eat those plants (or the animals who have eaten them), we are indirectly absorbing the energy of the sun, too. The amount of carbohydrates we are getting from the plants we eat are a biological signal that lets our bodies know how much sun is available in our environment. As respected neurosurgeon and health educator Dr. Jack Kruse says, “Food is an electromagnetic barcode of the sunlight as you rotate around the sun. Your mitochondria deciphers that code.”

Along with receiving circadian cues from locally grown and raised foods, they also provide ingredients needed for balanced energy production by our bodies. Contrary to what diet culture has taught us, our bodies do not burn calories for fuel. In fact, our bodies have no idea what a calorie is. One calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree celsius. In a lab, a sample of food is placed into a chamber surrounded by water. The food is ignited by an electric spark and burned. The surrounding water temperature is taken, and the degree to which the water’s temperature rises determines how many calories of heat energy were release by the food when it burned. Well that’s great, but your body doesn’t do that with the food you eat.

Our bodies make their own energy, called ATP, inside the mitochondria of every cell. This ATP is used to fuel everything; physical activity, brain function, digestion, hormone production, detoxification, immune function, etc. Without ATP, we don’t have life. In order to produce ATP, our cells need glucose (which, as mentioned, comes from plants that have harnessed the sun’s energy), fatty acids, amino acids (from protein), oxygen, and a multitude of vitamins and minerals. This means that the foods we eat are very important, as they provide ingredients needed for energy production, but it has nothing to do with calories.

The mitochondria make ATP through a process called the electron transport chain, in which electrons are passed along a series of protein complexes. As elections move along this chain, protons, or hydrogen ions, are also pumped across the mitochondrial membrane. The hydrogen is then used to fuel ATPase, which is a group of enzymes that create and break down energy. ATPase has a spinning head, which functions like a molecular motor that rotates to produce ATP. Hydrogen is the primary driving force that rotates this motor, which spins at a rate of about 9,000 rotations per minute. However, hydrogen isn’t just simply hydrogen; there are two different forms of hydrogen in the body, and only one of them can efficiently power that ATPase motor.

The two forms of hydrogen, or hydrogen ions, present in the environment and within our bodies are protium, which doesn’t contain a neutron, and deuterium, which contains one neutron and is slightly more than twice as heavy at protium. Protium, being much lighter, powers the ATPase motor optimally, and propels it to spin at that optimal 9,000 rotations per minute rate.

If heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, enters the cycle, it essentially bogs down and clogs up the ATPase motor, slowing the spin and impairing energy production. When it comes to supporting optimal energy production, we want protium in the mitochondria spinning that motor, not deuterium.

One out of every 6,420 hydrogen atoms, on average, is a deuterium isotope. All forms of water contain deuterium, but how much it contains varies across the globe. The levels of deuterium in the water in various environments depends on a range of factors like climate, precipitation, evaporation rates, altitude, and the current season (this is the important part). Plants, of course, absorb water from the environment, so they also take in its deuterium content. In plants, the deuterium is absorbed in their sugar structures. This means that the more sugar, or carbohydrate content, a plant has, the more deuterium it has. A banana, for example, contains higher deuterium levels than spinach.

As mentioned, we don’t want deuterium in our mitochondria, gunking up the ATPase motor. Consuming food or water that contains deuterium isn’t a bad thing, though, because our bodies have ways of mitigating that exposure. As part of the ATP production that happens in our mitochondria, our cells also produce water. When our skin is exposed to sunlight, the infrared light frequencies interact with that water within our cells and alters the structure of the hydrogen bonds, creating what’s known as structured water. Structured water is naturally lower in deuterium than regular water. The more sun exposure our bodies get, the more structured water our mitochondria create, and the less deuterium there can be inside the mitochondria.

If the amount of sun absorbed by the plants we eat matches the sun exposure our bodies receive (more or less), then our bodies can mitigate the deuterium we consume from those plants. Remember that plants absorb deuterium in their sugar structures, so a banana that was grown in the tropics has relatively high sugar content, and also a relatively high level of deuterium. If we are in the tropics when we eat that banana, the sun exposure we get there (as long as we spend time outside) helps our bodies create enough structured water to mostly eliminate the deuterium from our mitochondria. (Producing melanin from sun exposure, or a tan on the skin, also plays a role in removing deuterium from the mitochondria, but I don’t understand this process well enough to dive into that.) However, since we live in Louisiana where bananas can’t grow in winter, eating tropical bananas would more than likely cause us to ingest more deuterium than our bodies can naturally mitigate with the amount of sunlight we have available. The mitochondria will accumulate more deuterium, which will slow our ATP producing motor, and we’ll become less efficient at producing energy. It’s also worth noting that highly processed foods contain large amounts of deuterium. This is yet another reason prioritizing foods from nature is important!

Deuterium is a topic that’s fairly new to me and I’m still working on wrapping my brain around it properly. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this rabbit hole, I encourage you to look into the work of Dr Jack Kruse and learn more about how energy production involves light and electricity, rather than just chemical reactions as most of us understand it.

To simplify the importance of locally grown food, just remember that plants transform sunlight into carbohydrates. When they get a lot of sunlight, they can produce a lot of carbohydrates. When the days are shorter, sun exposure is less, so the plants that grow (like leafy greens and green beans) are lower in sugar content. It’s worth noting that more carbohydrate rich winter squash and potatoes are also abundant in cooler months, but they spend many more days absorbing sun’s rays than the greens with much shorter growing cycles.

Because plants absorb the sunlight that’s available where they grow, they send information to our bodies about the amount of sunlight available in our environment. Along with the sun entering our eyes, and the sleep and movement we get, the foods we eat provide signals that regulate our circadian rhythms and control our hormonal and neurotransmitter production. This is how eating local, in season foods throughout the year not only support our farmers and our environment, but also optimal balance within our bodies.

May we all enjoy and be grateful for the fall harvest that graces our tables on Thanksgiving this year. Perhaps we can begin to carry that spirit throughout all seasons and begin to prioritize preparing locally available foods to support balance within our bodies all year long.