Recommendation
Students should eat regular meals each day of the week. This would include breakfast on the weekends at around the same time as students have breakfast on weekdays. By eating at a similar time, every day for each meal, children can alter their biological clocks to allow themselves a more alert and easier morning. This new found alertness in the morning will improve learning, information retention, and test scores.
Article
The goal of this study was to see if using a 24 hour cycle of feeding could induce a change in the main biological clocks of rats by altering their peripheral tissues’ biological clocks. The scientists believed that there would be a significant change in the main biological clocks of the rats as it would be evolutionarily beneficial to be awake when food is available. The scientists measured core body temperatures of the rats at various times. They also measured the abundance of mRNA in cells upon the completion of the experiment by euthanizing the rats at various times of the feeding cycle.
The figure shows the core body temperature for the rats at various times of day, and thus various times of the feeding cycle. Following the line graph shows that the body temperature arose in anticipation of food and lowered when no food was expected. This trend allows us to add evidence to the hypothesis because an increase in body temperature at an atypical time for rats due to food indicates that the rats’ biological clocks have found a new rhythm that runs on a different schedule than the sun. The regular introduction of food showed that the liver and other organs are on a different biological clock than the rest of the body. The experiment also showed that given enough time, the main biological clock of a rat will change based on a food schedule. These findings could be extrapolated to people, and the necessity of a regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner for optimal daily performance. My question for the author of this study would be, have they attempted to do a study on people with a similar idea of study? For example, looking at how a person who eats on a regular schedule compares to a person who eats irregular times.
Sabath, E. (2014). Food entrains clock genes but not metabolic genes in the liver of suprachiasmatic nucleus lesioned rats. FEBS Letters, 588(17), 3104-3110. Retrieved September 2, 2014, from