The Science of Chronobiology & Health Optimization

• Why does modern life create “circadian pollution” — and how does it disrupt sleep, hormones, and metabolism?
• How can irregular light exposure, meal timing, and lifestyle habits desynchronize the body’s internal clocks?
• Why is the body not just chemistry, but chemistry scheduled in time, and how does that impact health outcomes?
• How do simple levers like light exposure, food timing, and movement help restore circadian alignment and resilience?
• Why can habits like late-night eating, weekend schedule shifts, and screen exposure act as forms of metabolic jet lag?

What We Discuss:

00:00 Intro: What Is Chronobiological Re-Entraining?
01:00 Signs Your Circadian Rhythm Is Disrupted
03:00 Modern Life and “Circadian Pollution”
05:30 Brain Clock vs Organ Clocks Explained
07:30 Wearables, Sleep Tracking & Ortho-Somnia
09:00 Why Light and Darkness Are Powerful Signals
11:30 Day Program vs Night Program Explained
13:30 The 3 Levers: Light, Food Timing & Movement
16:00 How to Fix Jet Lag Faster
18:30 Why Late-Night Eating Creates Metabolic Jet Lag
20:30 Sleep Anchoring and Morning Light Exposure
22:00 Common Myths About Sleep and Chronotypes
23:00 Final Takeaway: Rhythm = Resilience

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] 

Boomer Anderson: Hi guys.

Jodi Duval: Howdy,

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Hello.

Boomer Anderson: All right. So welcome everybody to 2026, and now we've gone from the Smarter Not Harder podcast to the Health Optimization Medicine podcast. More on that at some point in the future. But, uh, Jody 2026 means that the Rugby World Cup is not too far away. Are we gonna find an excuse to come visit you?

Jodi Duval: Yes, please. Yeah, we are the, as you said before, safest place at the moment. 'cause we're furtherest away from everything. So hopefully we just, um, mind our own business over here for a little bit longer.

Boomer Anderson: Yeah, well, but also I wanna come see New Zealand, play Australia, and uh, I believe the first match is held in Perth. So Jody, we need to get on that and make sure that something happens.

Jodi Duval: place to be is the, is the secret of the world that everyone thinks too far away and so. Gotta see it.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: When you get there, you will need, uh, chronobiological training,

Boomer Anderson: Oh, wow. Check out [00:01:00] that segue. Check out that segue. All right.

Jodi Duval: You're gonna flip time zones very quickly.

Boomer Anderson: So, uh, welcome back everybody to another episode of the Health Optimization Medicine podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about, uh, chrono bio. Excuse me, chronobiological re-entrainment. we're, we're very stick sticklers here for definitions. Does somebody want to define chronobiology?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: define it. Chronological re training is the deliberate wrist synchronization of the body's clocks, the brain clock and organ clocks back to coherent day night rhythm, using time cues, mainly light, but also food timing, movement, temperature, and social schedule. Right? That is a short definition

Boomer Anderson: perfect. Coming from. Coming from the guy who goes to Manila far too often, uh, is a perfect way to set off this de uh, definition. Uh, and so look. Chronobiology re [00:02:00] entrainment. We just talked about one, uh, called, uh, jet lag. Uh, uh, another one. Uh, well, let's look at just sort of how somebody might diagnose that they need to start training their own chronobiology.

Boomer Anderson: Uh, how do you guys look at this in terms of a clinical aspect? Jody, I know you see a lot of patients all the time, uh, in fact, your door might open soon with a patient behind you, but, uh, how do you. Assess somebody's chronobiology, chronobiology. Overall,

Jodi Duval: Hmm. Ooh. Yeah. This is a juicy, multilayered one. Okay, so obviously

Boomer Anderson: like GC multilayered questions. What can I say?

Jodi Duval: Uh, so firstly the most obvious ones is disrupted nighttime, um, sleep. So I, I do have a lot of patients coming in and they have, um, or present with insomnia. They either wake at a two or 3:00 AM consistently, they are urinating in the middle of the night. [00:03:00] They wake up in the morning tired. Um, and then there's the, the lifestyle components or the living components.

Jodi Duval: So they're inside a lot during the day. They love watching TV and working late at night. They have their phone on and they're right before bed and put it, put it down just

Boomer Anderson: You just described every entrepreneur in the world, right?

Jodi Duval: Yes. I'm just describing myself right now. No, I'm kidding. Um, that, yeah, so lack of sunlight outside. Um, they're eating at ad hoc times.

Jodi Duval: They're driving and eating. Um, and so you can already see from that that there's gonna be a disruption to the, light and the circadian, um, biology. So what I also see is microbiome, and this is less likely to be, a linked, component, but generally microbiome, and, movement of bowels.

Jodi Duval: You know, so you, you don't have regularity, you don't have proper clearance, um, or completion [00:04:00] as I call it. And it's also ad hoc throughout the day. You know, it might be every second day, it might be daily. They're getting bloated after food. So how I explain it to my clients is that the poor body has got these regular clocks and rhythms that it's used to throughout the day.

Jodi Duval: And what we do to it is surprise it at every moment we can. And it has to go and disrupt some of the other processes that it was already doing. And it was starting, you know, it was just cleaning the closet for you. And it was, it was really getting into the. Nitty gritty towels, you know, throwing out the old ones, lay in, layering them in color order, and you've just thrown some food down.

Jodi Duval: So now it has to go straight into the stomach and start to work there. And so if you can have more prediction for the body, then it's gonna be more efficient at, its, its ability to, um, predict and know and work efficiently with energy use and obviously have preparation like your acid, your enzymes. But, um, what we do in this current world is keep it at a, a constant state of, 

Jodi Duval: Had to be [00:05:00] prepared, and this is even the EMF piece and the fake light. You don't know where it is in time space. So it is confused and no wonder we are dysregulated.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yeah, actually Jodi makes three important points here. Um, the one could be summarized, you know, the, the, the, the last, uh, thing that she said could be summarized is modern life is, uh, is really called circadian pollution, right? So, one, the modern life that we have, you know, uh, we. We, we created a world with light at night, food at night, stress all day.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: And then we act surprises if, if biology gets confused, right? That's, that's, uh, that's terrible. Um, the second thing that she's pointed out here, that is that the brain has a master clock, but the tissues all have their local clocks, right? So in health optimization medicine, what do you like to do is to make the entire orchestra play together.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right. Uh, you know, we, we, we don't, we don't want the, the brain, uh, desynchronized from the rest of the other tissues. Acupuncturists already know this, right? Uh, when they know [00:06:00] that different organs work at different times of the day. And the the third thing that Jodi actually, uh, pointed she made here is that the body is not just chemistry, it's chemistry that's scheduled in time.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right. So it's a, the chemistry that's occurring and, you know, you're measuring the, the metabolites and then the, for example, in the lack of sleep, you could see the inflammatory markers go up or even the inflammatory cytokines go up, et cetera. But actually that can be measured only when at the par at part particular time.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right. When the body's stressed out, it produces that. So we are a time-based biology. You know, the circadian, uh, system is a, is a conductor. And an orchestra and the modern life is a circadian pollution. Uh, I, I think those three things sum up, uh, what Jodi has just mentioned, to us, uh, in, short, uh, uh, terms.

Boomer Anderson: Dr. BUCAs, I wanna pass things over to you to talk a little bit about, um, a, a additional diagnosis here and or detection. Uh, you [00:07:00] know, there's a lot to be said for wearables, also for some of the kind of non costly tests that are available online, do you have any favorites that you like to use with your clients?

Dr. Allen Bookatz: You know, the one that stands out is probably gonna be the Ora ring. Um, that one seems to be a favorite amongst myself and colleagues as well as clients.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yeah. Uh, the, or the, or explain later how oring gives you uhso

Dr. Allen Bookatz: ortho Somnia, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yeah. Orso,

Boomer Anderson: We'll, we'll get to it. We'll get

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Is it Ortho?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Orthosomnic anxiety. Orthorexic or anxiety is eating right. Right. And this ortho anxiety is sleeping. Right. It's like you're, and because of your Ora Ring you get so anxious about, you know, not sleeping. Right. Go,

Dr. Allen Bookatz: wake up, you wake up early to check to make sure that you had enough sleep. Yeah, it doesn't really fit that well. this Is a, this is a fascinating [00:08:00] topic and Jody covered most of what I, the initial thoughts that came to mind, but given in, given that I've spent the last 15 years in the ER as a shift worker, you know, one of the things that you learn very quickly is that it's not about how much time you sleep. And you learn that the fatigue that you experience and the lifestyle, the, the lifestyle things that follow many days after becoming out of sync with what your natural rhythm should look like, uh, and being out, out of sync with your biology. Um, that's where the real effects, I think, of the chrono.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Well, this, this rein training is really about. And so what we find is that you don't necessarily need to do what I did, which was work under the bright lights in the ER for 12 hours straight. Being, you know, telling my, telling ourselves to be awake when melatonin is supposed to rise, um, putting food in our system and when we're supposed to be sleeping and letting our gut [00:09:00] rest.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: So besides all the disruption with hormones and metabolism and recovery, we're actually doing the same thing by just looking at her phone at night. You're doing the same thing as I am. When somebody, if you're looking on social media and you're anticipating what's next on Instagram, and you're doing your doom scrolling and you think, oh, I'm just gonna do this for maybe 15, 20 minutes right before I go to bed, you're signaling to your brain the same thing that I'm experiencing in the ER when I'm anticipating a really sick trauma that's about to come in.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Your brain, your system doesn't know any different, and so the goal here really is about using light and darkness, both as medicine and thinking of those as really signals that we're giving the body at very specific intervals that helps either promote and anchor things like wakefulness and getting the day started, allowing our cortisol to rise and pulse.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Along its natural [00:10:00] cadence through the day, um, or the darkness, which is queuing our body to sleep, to recover, to restore, and to do all those things that we care about. Clean up our damaged DNA clean, you know, get rid of the cell waste that's built up over the day. Being awake is like having your car engine running all day.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: So the fuel the exhaust builds and we need a way to get rid of it. So.

Boomer Anderson: Very well said. I, I mean, I, I would just add there 'cause, uh, Dr. Buca, you touched a bit on Zeke Gaber and just different ways of anchoring, uh, the body and. Uh, through, through light and darkness predominantly. But I would just add in terms of a diagnostic tool that I hear come up con time and time again.

Boomer Anderson: And for somebody who doesn't want to spend the, I don't know what the, a ring costs now, 350 bucks or something, maybe 400. Um, if somebody doesn't wanna spend that, just looking at something as simple as like a Pittsburgh Sleep quality index. Um. But, uh, you know, [00:11:00] part of what Dr. Ted touched on earlier, and actually Alan, you just touched on this too, um. Areas that completely disrupt, uh, circadian rhythms. So jet lag shift work, social jet lag, or going out and partying on the weekends and wondering why you can't sleep on Sunday night. Uh, those are all circadian disruptors. We've done a little bit on diagnosing and sort of detoxing. Uh, what about corrections?

Boomer Anderson: How, how do we deal with something like a jet lag? And perhaps I'm gonna. Bump that spike over to the master of jet lag, uh, to go through this.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: No be. Before we talk about jet lag, uh, there's something here that actually Alan touched on also, uh, that has to be surfaced, uh, in this discussion, right? That the body actually is a day program in the night program. So the day program is about performance, alertness, you know, uh, fueling, glucose handling, you know, those are all part of the day program.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: The [00:12:00] night program is actually. Repair cleanup, you know, immune calibration, hormone choreography, et cetera. Uh, so, so you have, you know, you have your, uh, two different parts of the program that, uh, have, have to be, uh, balanced by the body, so. If you bring the day signals into the night, like bright light, big meals, intense simulation, then you steal from repair, and then you wonder why, you know, you get sick so quickly or, uh, you know, why you never recover from, uh, whatever it is that ails you.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right? So that's that. I think that's an important, thing that, that, I surfaced. So, uh, in terms of, of anything, not just jet lag, you know, there's actually, the three levers, you know, you could, you could think of in health optimization. You could think of time or timing. The when question, not the what question.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: You think of the when as your lever, right? Uh, and it becomes a lever this way that you can actually apply to, different parts of the, your body that gets a [00:13:00] synchronized from jet lag shift work and other things that actually desynchronized your, your sleep, right? So your, uh, chronobiology rather.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So light is the strongest cue, right? The strongest time cue. The morning bright light anchors the clock, you know, and the evening, uh, dim light protects the melatonin and the night program. So that's the first, lever that you can use. The second one, which we don't actually, think of it as a timer is actually food timing, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: The liver clock here is food louder than words, right? So, uh, meals are time signals to metabolism. late eating is a metabolic time zone shift. So what I do in my jet lag, for example, is I have a meal anchoring technique. so if the time difference between here and Washington, DC and Manila.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: is 12 hours and I eat dinner at 7:30 PM here, then I make sure that I eat breakfast there at 7:30 AM so I have a, a meal anchor, right? and essentially, uh, that's what I use to be able to synchronize myself [00:14:00] more quickly to the new, time zone, right? And then the third lever that you could use, you know, is aside from light, food timing is movement.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right. So morning or midday movement supports entrainment, right? but intense late night training can be a day signal, too close to bedtime, right? Ever wonder why when you, work out too close to bedtime, then you can't sleep, right? Well, duh. so light sets the brain clock, food sets the body clocks.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: And that's how I like to think of it. And, in terms of, The, uh, anchoring of the sleep time, right? One of the things that I, I do is what I call, develop a sleep anchoring technique, right? Is to anchor the time that you sleep to our particular time, right? You select it. You train yourself with it.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Even you just stay in bed for like an hour awake, you know, in two weeks you will entrain yourself to actually sleep at a time because then you will, we will not skimp on sleep. And that's usually our problem. It's like, oh no, I'll finish it until [00:15:00] tonight I'll just do a, you know, I'll do a, a an an overnighter, and then you, you'll totally skip your sleep.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: But if you put it as a first thing in your schedule, like, yes. You know, this is my first activity of day. Then you'll never skimp on it. And when you wake up in the morning, after you drink your one or two glasses of water to hydrate yourself, go sun yourself.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Get a sun lamp or whatever to start and training yourself and time your meals such that you get en-trained very quickly. These are very simple levers to use, uh, in any desynchronized situation, right? Uh, light, meal timing and activity. So, uh,

Boomer Anderson: And they cost nothing.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: It costs nothing, guys. Uh, and of course, um, if, if you want the Rolls Royce of things, then you include then the hormones.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Like for example, for me, when it's, uh, daytime here in the United States and I go to the Philippines, uh, right for, uh, home, home practice, what happens is that in the morning, in, in morning there, it's nighttime for me, right? So I have to push in my thyroid and cortisol

Dr. Ted Achacoso: hormones [00:16:00] in the morning, because that's what's expected in the morning, right? Until my body actually starts producing it on its own as it adjusts to the new time zone, right? So these are just the kinds of things that you have to think about, right? when you're looking like no thyroid is, uh, you know, the burst of thyroid

Dr. Ted Achacoso: cortisol actually done in the morning, the burst of your estrogen. Uh, and, and testosterone are actually done in the morning, right? Your, your, uh, growth hormone pulses, uh, you know, are done at night when you sleep, right? The, the pulse for you to, to release growth hormone is actually within the first hour sleep at night.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So, then, you know, to be able to augment those, right? Uh, with the right hormones, with the right. stimulating or, uh, uh, releasing, substances, in there that could help in the hormonal cascade. And that's, uh, actually, I consider that,

Dr. Ted Achacoso: the rolls royce because it's really very difficult to deal with the endocrine system, right? As I said, it's like grandma, it's an older system. it's based on the bloodstream and, and the, [00:17:00] the signaling, agents are actually dispersed, not in an electrical system, uh, electrochemical system, like the nervous system.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: It's in the blood, right? So, or in, in wet tissue, right? So it's like grandma, it's an analog communicating system. It goes in cycles, and we know that's true for sleep. Right. Sleep is a, is a cycle as well. And you don't tell grandma, no, do this now. No, you coax Grandma, grandma, please can you do this?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right? It's an, it's a more, it's a more ancient or, older system of communication and you better be nice to it, right? what we're talking about is that light is not just elimination for us, it's information, right? Light is not just elimination, it's information. It informs your body.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So. Guys start thinking of light as a drug, right? Because. As a drug, the timing of the light is your dosage. So, you know, and, and you're talking about wearables here, the Oura ring, et cetera. Hey, the sun is the original wearable guys, you know, it's, it just was [00:18:00] on, on your skin, right? and people said, oh, Dr.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Ted was the best sleep supplement I can take la la da. Especially, I'm jet lagged and so on. You know, the best sleep supplement is really sunset. So, you know, so, so, you know, these are very simple things to remember because we're yoked to the sun, we're yoked to the activity of the sun. That's how our genes are actually made, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So, in the lever of, in the level of, uh, eating right, it's like you should remember. What you eat is not a preference. It's a circadian signal. So now that, that, you know, it's a lever that you can pull, why not use it as a circadian, uh, signal, right? and then when you eat out of schedule, like you eat late at night, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: They're so tempted, you're so hungry. Like Dr. Bca just did a, a 24 hour, um, you know, uh, duty in the er, right? And he wants to eat something sweet like just before midnight. It's like. Late night eating is a metabolic jet lag. you're basically inducing a metabolic jet lag if you, [00:19:00] if you do that.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So if chronobiology is the operating system, uh, of your body, you know, your hormones are the app. so when you're, when you're looking at this and you're looking at the hormones, et cetera, et cetera, well, hey, they have to run at a particular time. It's very simple, right? You have to address. In health optimization medicine, we address not only the what of things.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: But the when of things, because the when of things will increase, the effectiveness will put the body back into Synchrony, right? Because the body, uh, is a network, right? There is a network, and the, a network works in actual synchronized way or what they call in, in more mature parlance, it's called network coherence, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: The body actually works coherently, right? So, so that's where I'm coming from here, uh, in terms of how you deal with jet lag and how you deal with, with, uh, other modes of the synchrony, right? Just use those three level, uh, levers available to you. You know, your, your light your meals.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Your food and then [00:20:00] your activity. And then if you, uh, have someone to guide you, then do, hormone balancing according to your new time schedule, you know? Uh, and that's it, right? The first three are free, 

Boomer Anderson: all right. So I, I'm gonna interject here. A selfish plug before we wrap things up. Um. In the Virtual Health Symposium, which we have coming up guys, April 22nd, 23rd, it's free. Uh, go and check it out@homehope.org. Uh, you can sign up there, but we do have a couple of episodes that of course talk about sleep as well as something that Dr.

Boomer Anderson: Ted just alluded to, which is time restricted feeding. So, um, you know, one of the things that, one of the themes that I heard today was anchors and whether it's a, a meal anchor. When you're traveling or sleep anchoring technique, um, plenty of anchors that help anchor your chronobiology. Any sort of final words of wisdom?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes. [00:21:00] Um, first we'd like to, to bust three myths here, that chronobiology is not just about sleep, right. No, sleep is just the visible tip. It's just the tip of the iceberg. The clocks that run metabolism, hormones, immunity and repair are clocks that are in your tissues. So, and then, oh, I catch up on weekends. So if you shift your schedule for two hours every week weekend, you're basically flying cross country twice a week.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Right? So, so that's like for, for

Boomer Anderson: Even in Australia.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: for those, especially for those of you who like, you know, Hey, it's Friday night. You know, and then, uh, there's also a myth that night owl can't change anything. No, chronotype is only a setting of tendencies, right? Uh, for you, the light and timing, they still move the needle more, more dramatically.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So to close this out, uh, in home, hope we say, just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy. And one of the fastest way to move from not sick to thriving is to restore biological [00:22:00] timing because rhythm is a form of resilience.

Boomer Anderson: And a form of dense. All right,

Jodi Duval: Yes.

Boomer Anderson: let's wrap things up as I just, uh, recanted, uh, the Health Optimization Medicine Practice Symposium. We're actually having a virtual one this year. Uh, April 22nd, 23rd, go and check that out at homehope.org. You can get a free ticket. We'll also probably link to this in the notes below.

Boomer Anderson: Um, if you are watching this on. YouTube, uh, please click, like, subscribe, leave a comment. We want to hear all about rhythms, your favorite biological rhythm, maybe a rhythm that you like to dance to. And if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or uh, Spotify, leave a five star review in a comment and we hope to hear more from you soon.

Boomer Anderson: let's sign off now from the Health Optimization Medicine and podcast. Thank you, Jody, Dr. Bu Katz, Dr. Kosso. It's been an absolute pleasure. Peace, love. [00:23:00] Bye.

Find more from Health Optimization Medicine and Practice (HOMeHOPe):

Website: https://homehope.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homehopeorg/

Virtual Symposium 2026: https://homehope.org/homehope-virtual-symposium-2026

Use PODCAST10 to get 10% OFF your purchase of the Clinical Metabolomics Module at https://homehope.org/products/clinical-metabolomics

Find more from Troscriptions:

Website: https://troscriptions.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troscriptions/

Use POD10 to get 10% OFF your Troscriptions purchase at https://troscriptions.com/collections/our-products