Episode 103 | Oct 24, 2024

Mastering Circadian Rhythms, With Dr. Deanna Minich

Are you familiar with your circadian rhythm and how it influences your health? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi speaks with Dr. Deanna Minich, a renowned nutrition scientist, functional medicine expert and FMCA Educator, to dive deep into circadian rhythms, what they are, and how they shape key aspects of our biology like hormone production, metabolism, and overall well-being. Dr. Minich brings decades of experience in the field, sharing insights on how circadian rhythms intersect with nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle choices.

“All of these conversations we’re having within functional medicine, it’s all about how do we find our way back to a more nature-based way of living. And that’s what the circadian rhythm is calling us back to.”

Deanna Minich

In this episode, Dr. Minich explains how circadian rhythms are more than just a sleep-wake cycle—they govern many bodily processes, from cortisol levels that wake us up in the morning to melatonin that prepares us for sleep at night. She also introduces the concept of personalized chronotypes, explaining that not everyone thrives under the same 24-hour schedule. Whether you’re a morning lark or a night owl, your circadian rhythm has a significant influence on your energy, productivity, and even your muscle efficiency during exercise.

For health coaches, understanding circadian rhythms offers a valuable tool to guide clients toward healthier living. Dr. Minich’s insights show that by helping clients align their eating habits, exercise, and exposure to natural light with their natural rhythms, coaches can support better hormone regulation, improved metabolism, and overall well-being. Health coaches can leverage these concepts to offer personalized advice that helps clients get back in sync with nature’s rhythms.

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Dr. Sandi: We are hearing so much these days about circadian rhythm, but do you actually know what it is? If you’re a coach, can you explain it to clients? Is it something that is one size fits all or is it personalized? Do we each have our own unique circadian rhythm? Can we influence our circadian rhythm? What’s the impact on our hormone production, for example? What is the effect of what we’re eating and how we’re exercising on our circadian rhythm? Are we out of touch with nature? And will getting back in touch with nature by bringing in things like sunlight, will that change our circadian rhythm and improve it? Well, these are some of the topics that we get into with one of my favorite guests. I have known Deanna Minich for quite some time and she is one of the people that I admire greatly. She has been a member of the faculty of FMCA from the time we got started. She is a valuable, valuable member of our faculty and of course the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine, our collaboration partner.

So, let me tell you about Deanna Minich. She is a nutrition scientist, an international lecturer, educator, and author with over 25 years of experience in academia and the food and dietary supplement industries. And she’s currently the chief science officer at Symphony Natural Health. She’s been a very active functional medicine clinician in clinical trials and in her own practice, food, and spirit. She’s the author of six consumer books on wellness topics, four book chapters, and over 50 scientific publications. Through her talks, her workshops, her groups, her in-person retreats, she helps people transform their lives practically and artfully their nutrition and lifestyle. You can visit her at deannaminich.com. I know you will enjoy my conversation with Dr. Minich as much as I enjoyed filming it.

Deanna, welcome. I think I first met you when I was going through IFM working towards my certification, and I was just blown away by you, your spirit, your wisdom and so I’m so happy to chat with you today.

Deanna: Oh, I felt the same about you, Sandi. And we had the pleasure of co-teaching for the University of Western States some years ago.

Dr. Sandi: That’s right.

Deanna: And we both have the Chicago connection, of course.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, yes. And you were raised by somebody into health foods, and I was somebody during that era into health foods and Adelle Davis’ way of eating. We’re talking today about something that I think is not talked about enough, and there’s a lot of confusion around it and that has to do with circadian rhythms, how they impact your health. So, let’s get started just by talking about what are circadian rhythms or rhythm and can you describe that if somebody were new and saying I don’t understand what this is and why it’s important?

Deanna: Sure. Circadian rhythm is one of the many rhythms of nature. It’s the 24-hour day-night cycle. So, it’s the Earth’s movement around its axis essentially. So, we get different hours of daylight and different hours of nighttime depending on where we live and depending on the season. But in essence, circadian rhythm is the 24-hour day-night cycle. Sandi, it’s so interesting because studying nutrition, I used to think that the be-all and the end-all was nutrition science. But then as you start to get into chronobiology in the influence of circadian rhythm on our biological system, you can essentially see that nutrition falls underneath circadian rhythm. Time is the overseer for so many things, for eating, for fasting, for physical activity, for social gathering, the sleep-wake cycle. I mean, it is running our physiology to such a great extent. So, it became part of my four principles because before it was always color, creativity, and diversity. And then when I saw the influence of circadian rhythm, lunar rhythm, seasonal rhythm, hormonal rhythm, rhythm became the fourth principle that I really connect everything that I do around.

Dr. Sandi: How can we assess our circadian rhythm? Does everybody have the same circadian rhythm, 24-hour cycle, or is it personalized? Would mine be different from yours, for example?

Deanna: Well, there’s a little bit of nuance there, but for the most part we each live on the planet Earth and we’re all subject to the sunlight and to the hours of darkness. But the way that your cells receive circadian signals could be a little bit different compared to just one person to the next. And much of the signal that comes in through the pineal gland that is disseminated through melatonin, and that happens in darkness, our individual cells might receive that signal differently based on our clock genes. And in fact, some labs are now looking at gene variants in clock genes, which is really interesting.

The other place that we would see variability that is more personalized would be in the way of kinetics related to metabolism of certain, I would say, medications or drug agents, because things like liver metabolism are under the guise of circadian rhythm. And that’s why pharmacists know a lot about when to give a certain drug, what time of day, because of the metabolism of that. So, our individual systems might have a little bit of nuance there.

The last part I could see where there’s personalized variation would be whether we feel that we’re a morning lark, like a morning bird, we wake up with the sun, early to bed, early to rise person, or a night owl. That could be something that… It’s called a chronotype, so it’s something that is more personalized to the individual. And one is not better than the other. So many people feel like, “Oh, you have to wake up early in the morning.” And I had a conversation with Dr. De La Iglesia at the University of Washington, and he’s a neuroscientist. And I asked him this question, and he gave me a very interesting response. And he said from his sleep research, what he would say is that one is not better than the other, but our society is primed for morning efficiency and morningness. So, that’s why many times the night owls don’t seem to thrive in society, and that’s seen as not a good imprint because they’re not able to perform as well in our morning-driven society. So, I do think that creative people, people that just… the brain may work and have different aspects of plasticity, you see that a higher degree of creativity in the nighttime hours for certain people. So, again, I don’t want to put one on top of the other, but there is some degree of personalization around chronotype.

Dr. Sandi: And now we can see that. We can track it. For example, people who have Oura Rings. And I have one, and I can see my sleep was aligned with my chronotype, which earlier in my life, I always identified as a night owl, stayed up quite late, and now I’m more of that morning lark, but it has to be that sweet spot. So, many times I have tried to get up earlier, like 5, 5:30, and I just was not thriving at that time. So, now I’ve pushed it back and I get up between 6, 6:30, and that seems to work. Same with an earlier bedtime whenever I pushed myself to get to bed really early like at 9, 9:30, which some people love to do, it just doesn’t work. I just need to stay up a bit longer. So, I think often it is trial and error, but now we don’t have to guess. We can have our Oura Ring, we can see our quality of sleep, and also assess how we feel during the day experimenting. So, there’s so much now talking about circadian rhythm and hormones. Can you address that? How does it impact our hormones?

Deanna: Our hormones run on that circadian clock. So, just to focus again back on morning time, one of the first hormones that we see emerging in a healthy person would be cortisol in the morning. Cortisol gets us up and out of bed, and we also see testosterone peaking in the morning. So, testosterone is the hormone of motivation. So, we get the impetus to start the day from cortisol and testosterone, which just naturally follow that diurnal rhythm. And then we move our way through the day and we see peaks of insulin, which is another hormone. And then if we look into the night, as it starts to become more dim, the pineal gland gets the signal to start producing melatonin. And melatonin then will set the circadian signal at night in the pinnacle of darkness, which is typically between 2 and 4 a.m.

So, different hormones are connected in at different times. And Dr. Satchin Panda has done an amazing research looking at hormones, metabolism, circadian rhythm. And so he talks a lot about just even when we eat, all the hormones and the metabolism that are connected to circadian rhythm. And his research would suggest that, for the sake of healthy metabolism, having an 8 to 10-hour feeding window every day is important for hormones and just overall metabolism. So, you know, there’s probably not as much difference between 8, 9, and 10. But the moment that we go beyond 10, and we start now eating for 16 hours of the day or 12 hours of the day, this starts to become more disruptive to hormones, even to melatonin at night, when we’re not meant to be digesting at night. We’re meant to be setting the stage for a more parasympathetic state and moving into sleep.

So, when I think of hormones, I think of a lot of these different aspects of our metabolism and how we can be better priming our metabolism. And even, you may have some interest in this, muscle. Muscle is connected to circadian rhythm, to the clock. We have better efficiency, even motor coordination, and just overall metabolism through the muscle when we are in adherence with that 8 to 10-hour time-restricted eating window. So, again, if we get a little bit more sloppy, and we’re doing some nighttime eating, then we tend to lose the muscle efficiency that we could be having. And in fact, in Dr. Panda’s research in mice, when he kept them to that 8 to 10-hour window of feeding and looked longer term, what he found was that they increased in their muscle mass. I believe it was a 10% to 15% muscle mass increase. So, you’re actually creating a more fit body just by keeping your eating window to a certain select timeframe.

Dr. Sandi: Wow, that’s fascinating. So, eating within that select timeframe that is aligned with your circadian rhythm, and it is going to help you to preserve and possibly make it easier to build muscle, which we all want to do, especially in my age bracket, where we are losing muscle at such a rapid rate. It seems that our modern life is just not conducive to this way of being. We have screens that were on till late at night. We’re binge-watching Netflix. We are on our computers, on our phones. The first thing we do when we wake up is on our phone. Before we go to bed. And that plus we have bright lights around our homes, and LED lights, which I cannot get used to. I want the old incandescent ones back just because those harsh LEDs combined with the blue light often combined with eating past our eating window, past dinner… So, can you comment on those risk factors and what you can do about it?

Deanna: Well, it’s almost like we’re all shift workers, because we have modern lifestyles that equate to circadian dysregulation, no matter how you slice it. And you just listed a bunch of different aspects that we’re confronted with those on a daily basis, right? So, for people who are actually engaged in shift work, especially when they’re rotating through a variety of different shifts, this is very disruptive to the circadian rhythm. People who travel across time zones. You mentioned the artificial light, especially at night. With the advent of electricity, we became more productive but we became more unhealthy. And having that blue light at night, again, is signaling to the brain not to produce melatonin in the same way, right? And then having erratic eating habits, not being consistent.

Sandi, one of the things that you said about your Oura Ring is knowing your chrono rhythm. And one of the things that I’ve learned from doing the melatonin masterclass and interviewing all these experts is that adhering to circadian rhythm is one thing, but then adhering to your own circadian rhythm and being consistent, whatever you do, be consistent. And that’s why one of the antidotes to what I would call the circadian syndrome or this chronobiological disease or the increased risk for diseases because of being out of alignment is to create some pattern of consistency, create rituals that have meaning, and to be thinking about every hour of your day and how precious it is and how there are certain things that are happening physiologically and how can we better prime our activities around what is happening in our physiology. And for some of us, we may only be able to patch over like having blue light blocking glasses at night, dimming the lights in our home at night, just having our screens be less bright, less blue.

But it is very interesting. I think that eventually what we’re all going to find just from looking at circadian rhythm, even nutrition and physical activity is that we are all being pulled back to nature. So, even when you look at indigenous societies where they have no electricity, the way that they live is they go to bed… And people even notice this when they go camping, right, when you don’t have all of the light. So, you tend to go to bed when it starts to get dark just because it just feels like the body just naturally goes into that. You sleep better, you sleep more soundly, and then you wake up with the light. So, I feel like all of these conversations we’re having within functional medicine, it’s all about how do we find our way back to a more nature-based way of living. And that’s what, again, the circadian rhythm is calling us back to.

Dr. Sandi: Well, I love that. And recently I have started to get some kind of sunlight outside. Now, this is challenging if you live in an area where it might be days or even months with no sun at all. But there’s always sun peeking through, but at least being outside for just a little bit of time. And I just love that feeling of that first morning sun and it doesn’t have to be a long time. Today, I just went out and stood out and looked up at the sun for maybe less than a minute, not directly at the sun, but just that feeling of being bathed in sunlight. And it’s just a wonderful feeling. Whereas, previously I would go through my whole routine, which typically involved yoga, and I would do all this stuff inside. And then late, late morning, I would get outside. And now I’m, kind of, reverse engineering that and at least having that opening the door and letting the sunshine in and then going and doing my routine.

And you mentioned ritual. And, yes, my yoga is a ritual that I do every morning no matter where I am, even if I’m traveling. And so the importance of having that routine I think is something that coaches can help people because it’s not the same for everybody. But once they get used to that pattern, yes, it feels really good. It’s part of their rhythm of life.

Deanna: It is. And I really like what you’re saying about that early morning light, because that is one of the things that can set our circadian rhythm on a good note as we move into the day. And even if it’s just for a couple of minutes, just to be outside, one of the things that will help with that circadian rhythm as well is when we wake up, using that first hour of waking to hydrate, to go outside, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes, and even if you have cloudy skies and it’s not very bright, just expose the eyes to that full spectrum light, even if it’s dampened down.

And then the other thing I’m thinking about for people that work from home, the impact of working in front of a window is significant. Or, if you’re doing yoga, if you can have a yoga studio where there is a window and you have the option to be by the window, go by the window. Or, if you’re at a gym and you’re working out, go close to the windows if you can, whatever you can do to bring in more light, because we’ve actually flip-flopped our circadian rhythm. We are waking up and immersing ourselves into a darker-lit environment than we’re used to. If we look at the measurement of light, let’s just go back to that for a second, because I think what’s really important here, just like you started us off with the Oura Ring, is to measure. We need to measure the amount of light exposure that we’re getting. And the measurement of light is lux. One lux is equal to a candle flame 3 feet away. So, the higher the amount of lux, the more the light exposure.

So, I was at the beach this past summer, height of the day, noontime, I pulled out my app to assess the lux. So, you can actually get a reading on that. And it was 15,000 lux. Now when I’m indoors like this but yet I’m working in front of a window, I’ve actually measured my light and I’m at 4,000 at the peak of the day. Not quite the 15,000 of being out in broad daylight. But if I was facing a wall, I might be down to 100 to 200 lux. And then in the evening, what people typically do is now we again reverse. And instead of having the darkness, now we have the super-saturated blue artificial light, which is actually not just not good for our circadian rhythm but also not good for the eyes. So, then we need to be looking at things like protecting the macula, which is in the retina with blue light protection like lutein, and zeaxanthin and bringing that in through the diet. So, yeah, we have really flip-flopped things around, but I do think it’s important for everybody listening and for coaches to coach to metrics like measuring lux. And you can do that so easily with certain apps.

Dr. Sandi: I love that idea. My studio where I am right now, this used to be a walk-in closet, which I didn’t need and converted it to an office and put in a big… I extended the window and put in a skylight so that during the day, I never have to use any artificial light. It just comes in naturally. And that was my one big requirement when we moved here that if this were to be my office, I had to bring in the natural light. And most days it works except when it’s dark and cloudy or a snowstorm in Chicago and I have to turn on the light. But other times, it works well. So, you mentioned diet and in terms of the eating window, but what else? How does diet or nutrition influence our circadian health?

Deanna: That’s a big conversation, but what I would say for the essence of it is to look to plants because plants have an intelligence that is connected to the circadian rhythm as well as the seasonal rhythm. And they are making phytochemicals that would be helpful for us to align our own circadian rhythm. In fact, I presented on this topic at the recent IFM annual conference where I was talking about chronorythms and having polyphenols in plant foods to help us modulate our circadian rhythm. And as it turns out, a lot of these different plant compounds, which we know of as polyphenols, this is the largest category of phytochemicals, they do act as chronobiotics. If we have certain plant foods at certain times of year, it’s informing our endocrine system that it is within a certain season or that we need certain things metabolically. And I’ll give you an example of that.

So, eating cherries out of season. So, cherries are more of a spring-summer food, but if we’re eating them through the year into the autumn-winter, we can actually signal different metabolic effects and have different gene expression related to metabolism. So, having things like apples or grapes in the autumn months are wonderful and very much aligned to the polyphenols that would be modulating in a favorable way our circadian biology. And also just aside from that, what we see is that foods that are grown seasonally, like let’s just take broccoli as an example, broccoli in its natural seasonal growth is ready to go in the autumn months. And if you look at autumn broccoli versus spring broccoli, there is two times greater levels of vitamin C in autumn broccoli versus spring. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have broccoli in the spring, but it just means that, when you go to the market… This is why farmer’s markets are so great because you can already see what is in season because the farmers are there growing it and providing it to you. But when farmer’s markets aren’t active typically between October to February, March, you may have to lean on websites to tell you what is in your area, ask your local market, or shop at smaller markets where they tend to have things that are brought in from the community or community-supported agriculture, CSAs, which are also very connected to whatever just happens to be growing at that time of year.

So, I feel, Sandi, that part of the disparity in some of the nutrition research that has been published might actually be because you have different seasons in which the research was done and some people might be eating certain things and some people may not be eating seasonal foods. How much does the seasonal eating component change our psychoneuroendocrine immune system? There’s an article talking about food research and potentially the interference from not taking into account seasonal eating. And even again, the foods’ nutrients are different throughout the year. So, if you’re having again, back to the broccoli and you’re part of a research study and they’re looking at broccoli consumption, you may be getting different nutrients from that broccoli depending on the time of year that you were eating it.

So, nutrition is a big deal. There’s a whole field that has emerged called chrononutrition, which is talking about not just the what of eating but the when of eating. So, the time that you eat, which we’ve talked about with the time-restricted eating, but everything that we’re eating and the macronutrient-micronutrient composition is going to be informing at some level our metabolism, which is very much tethered to our circadian rhythm.

Dr. Sandi: Well, this is fascinating. And as you were speaking, I just thought here in the Midwest and it’s fall, I don’t have a taste for watermelon or cherries you associate fourth of July time of year. But now you want to go apple picking, the leaves turning color, you want pumpkin soup. Those are naturally gravitating towards those types of foods. So, it’s really fascinating. And I think these are areas where coaches can help people even bringing back memories of things that they would eat when they were younger or naturally like what they would gravitate towards versus what’s not appealing just because it’s not in season. And so it’s a wonderful area to explore. I think it’s fascinating.

I want to turn to the wonderful work you are doing with Symphony Natural Health. If you can describe, you are hosting a circadian challenge. Tell us about that.

Deanna: Yeah, I think with all of our work on melatonin because we do have a melatonin product that is made from plants and publishing in this area and getting a lot of attention, a lot of connection into the academic world, what we decided to do was to go a bit deeper into interviewing some of the academic and clinical experts out there. The ones that you don’t typically hear from because they’re so buried in the trenches that they’re not in the limelight per se. They’ve been doing this work for decades upon decades. So, Dr. Paolo Lissoni, Dr. Russel Reiter, Dr. Tan, Dr. Horacio de la Iglesia. I mean, we brought in Dr. Terry Wahls as well.

So, we have an educational component to the circadian challenge. It’s called the melatonin masterclass, which is integrated in with the circadian challenge. And the circadian challenge is a boots-on-the-ground, very applied online program, run through Facebook in which we for 10 days are going to be looking at the circadian rhythm and trying to better our connection to circadian rhythm. So, we start on November 1st and we go until November 10th. And the reason why we selected that timeframe is because on November 2nd, moving into November 3rd, depending on where we’re living, but for most of us in the United States, we are changing our clocks. And whether we’re falling back an hour or springing forward an hour, it’s still very disruptive to the circadian rhythm. So, we decided to have this very dedicated time block of November 1st to November 10th to take people through a circadian journey.

And the way that I’ve created it too is every day of the journey, we’re going to look at a certain slice of the time pie. So, we’re going to start with the night before, because as Dr. Panda would say, the day ahead is primed from the night before. So, we start with 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on the first day and we move through the clock every day of the challenge. And we have tools. We have the FMCA health coaches, the circadian health coaches, and we’ve got a number of them that are going to work with us on this process in order to help people navigate. And they’re going to do that through different tools. So, we’ve created a separate toolkit for this experience. Like, one of them is really beautiful. It’s called the circadian clock tool, and it’s done in concentric circles where we look at all of the different zeitgebers or time givers, eating, fasting, darkness, exercise, light exposure. And together with their clients, they can work on plotting first and foremost what are people currently doing, and then moving them into a healthier clock rhythm for themselves like back to your initial point about a personalized rhythm, right? What is going to work for them? So, I’m excited for that.

There’s also a darkness deficiency questionnaire that the coaches are going to assess whether or not somebody has true darkness deficiency. How do you actually know? Is just being in blue light at night occasionally enough or do we need a little bit more exploration of that and quantification? And then there’s a melatonin insufficiency assessment, because, Sandi, one of the main questions I get on podcasts is, “Deanna, how do I know if I’m low in melatonin?” So, we have a checklist of all the many things that can lead to lower endogenous melatonin production, just to keep people on the pulse of what actually changes their melatonin. And in knowing that, then course correcting with the coach as to how they can improve their nutrition and lifestyle to do what they can in order to better their melatonin levels, which is going to help them with circadian rhythm.

Dr. Sandi: Wow, this is a wonderful initiative, and I love that coaches are involved with that. So, how can people get involved if they want to participate?

Deanna: The website is circadianchallenge.com. And that’s for the online experience. It’s free to everybody, by the way. And if you do want to work with a coach, you can choose from a variety of different coaches. They have different coaching sessions and packages that are tailored to this experience. And I think, Sandi, that working with a coach in this context is going to be much more powerful for helping to effect change, right? Because circadian rhythm doesn’t stop after November 10th. We really want a sustainable long-term benefit to our circadian rhythm. So, working with a coach, I think, will be the value-add in this experience. The other website to go to is melatoninmasterclass.com, which is free. One talk per day on all kinds of topics, melatonin and the immune system, melatonin and mitochondria function, melatonin and metabolism. I mean, all these different ways to look at how melatonin can be informing and helping us with many different body systems that are under circadian control.

So, I’m excited. It’s actually these two projects and these programs to educate and then apply what everybody is learning. And we’re going to do this in a group fashion. And this is like my sweet spot. So, I love doing online group programs. I feel like the group heals the group. I feel that we are going to learn from each other. Each of the coaches are going to be doing Facebook Lives on the different themes that we have every day of the program. Not only do we have slices of time for each day, but we also have themes like one day is dedicated to sleep. Then the next day we have dedicated to aging. We have another day dedicated to physical activity. We have a day dedicated to eating. So, all of the questions that you asked me about eating. So, this is a forum where many people can get their questions answered around circadian rhythm and these different aspects of their lives that they’re already thinking about. So, I feel like it’s really a game changer for people’s health. We are living in the endocrine circadian era of looking at these different connections. So, I’m excited.

Dr. Sandi: Well, I can hear the excitement in your voice, and we are so excited about supporting this initiative. And our coaches have had the opportunity to participate. What a wonderful opportunity and I hope we can continue this challenge and grow it because it is so, so important as we are living in this world of very challenging, compromised circadian rhythm. So, it’s been a delight. And Deanna, where can people find you?

Deanna: They can find me on my website deannaminich.com. There’s also symphonynaturalhealth.com. But the two major sites for the program again are melatoninmasterclass.com and Circadian Challenge.

Dr. Sandi: All right. Well, we have all of those in the show notes. It’s been a delight as usual to be with you. And thank you so much for being on our podcast.

Deanna: Thanks so much, Sandi. And thanks for being open to connecting on the coaches and putting them all in gear on this very important initiative. So, kudos to you and your team. Thank you.

Dr. Sandi: It’s our delight.