Starving away jetlag smooths travel
Cheddar pretzels, animal crackers, peanut bags and other airline specialty snacks
may come with warning signs, ‘This meal may worsen jet lag.’
MATTHEW EDLUND M.D.
Contributing Columnist
health@manateerivernews.com
If you think long distance air travel cannot get worse, guess again. You may find standard airplane food replaced with,perhaps — nothing? The perpetrators of this potential infamy are rodents, a pack of mice in the Harvard laboratories of Professor Clifford Saper. Saper, who is chairman of neurology at the university, is better known for his theory of the brain adenosine “onoff switch” controlling sleepiness, which helps explain why caffeine keeps you awake. The Harvard rodents were trained to simulate jet lag by use of varying light phases. Light has long been known as a major determinant to time your 24-hour clock. Saper’s group found that time of eating profoundly reset those clocks. If the rodents were kept without food longer and longer, their clocks eventually shifted to that of their feeding times.
Hard-pressed airlines have not yet responded to the new research, but profit- busting commercial opportunities are rife. Cheddar pretzels, animal crackers, peanut bags and other airline specialty snacks may now come with warning signs: “this meal may worsen jet lag.” First class patrons might discover radically reduced portion sizes for gourmet meals to “alleviate effects of jet lag.” Sensible economic incentives, like those advocated by the present administration, might include marking up airplane food prices to cut off feeding behavior that “might otherwise lead to worsened jet lag and diminished economic performance on arrival.” Airport businesses could also benefit. Special breakfast meals could be served 24 hours a day with “special time zone pricing,” determined by the length of the trip and the airline’s respectively on-time efficiency. Patrons could choose foods based on the number of hours flown,direction and time spent sitting on the runway, with exceptionally thrifty meals for “passengers delayed by immigration.” What Saper has discovered is not really new. Researchers have known for years that there’s more than one 24-hour clock — in fact, there are loads of them.
Scientists often think hierarchically, and many researchers consider the “master” 24-hour clock as emanating from the brain’s well-studied suprachiasmat i c nuclei. The problem is that much of the rest of the body does not apparently listen. The liver, the kidneys and other organs have their own, independent 24- hour clocks. Those clocks do not shift at the same rate as you change time zones.
Even if its Saturday morning the day after your arrival in Manila, your brain may think it’s 7 a.m., but your liver may still be convinced it’s Friday night. Perhaps changing feeding time effects these multiple clocks. While light is most effective in resetting 24-hour clocks, eating and socializing also shift circadian rhythms. So there are lots of ways to try and fix jet lag.
Overcoming jet lag
Without conscious effort, people adjust to jet lag about an hour a day going west, a little less moving east. If you’re going on a business trip from New York to Shanghai, the 12-hour shift may produce cognitive disaster. By research reports, the best way to overcome jet lag is to combine light with exercise. You arrive, then at set hours put on or off sunglasses, walk or sit in sunlight and go to sleep. These schemes can work well, but are complicated and effortful. When faced with something complex that demands thought and physical activity, Americans usually turn to their preferred form of biological manipulation — downing a pill. There is no pill for jet lag. Still, several medications are useful. Australian sleep researchers, who spend untold hours on planes, often use melatonin, whose effects on biological clocks are small but predictable. Sleeping pills have long been used to accommodate to changing time zones. Though they will not change internal clocks as do light, exercise or melatonin, sleeping pills are still not simple to use. That 15-hour trip from Detroit to Shanghai almost invites sleeping pill use, but sleeping in a cramped space may increase the risk of venous clots. Those tiny seats don’t give you much chance to move, unlike normal beds where sleeping people move around a lot. Taking a sleeping pill at your new destination, if not combined with timed light and exercise, may also have unpredictable effects on already compromised thinking ability, easily worsened by any airplane alcohol. However, people are ingenious when using pills. Frequent long distance flyers often chance the emerging class of “neuro-enhancers.” Drugs like modafinil, originated to treat narcolepsy, operate differently from stimulants like amphetamines. Frequently popped by students thinking they’ll do better on exams, modafinil is surreptitiously used to overcome jet lag, often in combination with sleeping pills.
Until people learn quicker, easier ways to utilize timed exercise and light, these powerful medications will prove increasingly popular. In the end, properly timed “starvation” may have a role in fixing jet lag for species other than mice. We’ll just have to see how those large mammals stuffed into airline seats respond to no food.
Dr. Matthew Edlund practices sleep medicine and
psychiatry in Sarasota. His new book, “Designed To
Last,” is available online. He can be reached at 365-
4308 and via his Web site at doctoredlund.com.
