This myth is not only unscientific, it is profoundly dangerous, and has become the driving force of a range of modern diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
This relates to cerebral energy provision over the hours of the nocturnal fast. The brain has no store of its own (around 30-60 seconds) and must rely exclusively on the liver to supply glucose during the night fast. The modern myth of not eating late results in a 12-hour fast, and if breakfast is missed, 18 hours.
Failure to replenish the liver prior to sleep activates chronic nocturnal adrenal stress, every night in life.
Sleep is an energy-driven physiological process. When we go to bed, the brain goes (or should go) to work. With a depleted liver, there isn’t sufficient fuel to provision cerebral energy, and the brain is forced to activate adrenal stress physiology to maintain its fuel supply.
Hibernation Honey is the patented gold standard food for selectively replenishing the liver prior to sleep, resulting in improved sleep quality and recovery physiology, improved learning (we learn during rapid eye movement – REM – sleep), and reduction of the adrenal stress-driven diseases. Studies show that only six nights of stressed/short sleep in healthy young men is all that’s required to raise appetite and put them at risk of diabetes/obesity and cognitive decline. Most of our population do this every night in life.
An added bonus of replenishing the liver with Hibernation Honey prior to sleep is that recovery physiology burns body fat exclusively, whereas exercise burns muscle and body fat in a 50/50 ratio. This means that if we activate sleep and recovery, we may burn five times as much body fat overnight than in a 90-minute exercise protocol (this is counterintuitive, but science is exactly that).
A well-fuelled brain (via the liver) prior to sleep is a happy brain, able to orchestrate the events of recovery and learning during sleep without interruption, and without initiating metabolic stress.
The poetic metabolic cycle that activates sleep and recovery physiology and prevents chronic nocturnal metabolic stress is the Honey/Insulin/Melatonin (HYMN Cycle) elaborated in the book SmartSleep by myself and Ron Fessenden MD MPH, to be published in 2012.
We are happy to share the confidential science and patent information with any progressive beverage company that’s interested to explore this new frontier in beverage innovation.
Hibernation Honey is a brand/patented formulation containing an ounce of honey, with the added natural principle that optimally catalyses sleep and recovery physiology, in a suitable and stable vehicle such as fruit juice.
This may prove to be the most significant and cost-effective contribution to public health (and learning) in several generations.
**Mike McInnes MRPS is a pharmacist and author of The Hibernation Diet*
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