For most of us the holidays mean family, food, and a few extra pounds gained along the way--the stuff of New Years’ resolutions.

Dr. Satchin Panda

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But, what if the rules were changed just a little, so that when you eat becomes more important than what you eat? That could be the case, say researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments with mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver--the body's metabolic clearinghouse--is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body's circadian clock, as conventional wisdom had it.

“I noticed that every time there was a news release about a really old person, like somebody living to be 110 years old,” says the study's leader, Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory, “that these guys had a very strict routine in their life. They may have been eating a high fat diet or a low fat diet, but all of them ate and drank on a schedule.”

But Dr. Panda says that it wasn’t only the eating habits of centenarians that inspired him to investigate whether the timing of eating affects health. Another population that caught Dr. Panda’s eye was shift workers, for one very simple and startling reason: “Invariably,many of them, after they hit 50 or 60 get metabolic syndrome,” meaning, he says, that they suffer from one or all of the big three health problems in America: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Thought to be a byproduct of the destruction of one’s internal clock from working different night and day shifts, Dr. Panda learned that metabolic syndrome is not restricted to shift workers. In fact, he says metabolic syndrome can strike anybody, and for one simple reason: electricity.

“If you go back a hundred years” says Dr. Panda, “our awake time was more restricted to daylight, and most of the food we were consuming was restricted to daytime hours.” He says that by contrast, modern feeding time extends well into the night.

A lab mouse.

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“And,” he says, “some people wake up in the middle of the night and drink milk or juice or eat a snack.”

The quick fix for post New Years’ dieters? Dr. Panda says no more eating at night. “Unless you stop eating in the evening and allow your body to have eight to 10 hours of fasting time, no diet will give you enough benefit,” he says.

Shift workers can derail metabolic syndrome by keeping their same work, eating and sleeping schedules on days off. "We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body's metabolism,” says Panda, “but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle."

The findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, Dr. Panda says he no longer eats between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. "I even lost weight,” he says, “although I eat whatever I want during the day.”