Life on earth has evolved in the context of 24-hour periodicity in environmental conditions and a dependent daily rhythm in food availability and predator avoidance.

Consequently, organisms have evolved endogenous circadian oscillators that allow them to anticipate and prepare for activity, sleep and food intake at a specific time of the day.

Both food ingestion and fasting can alter the metabolic state. Therefore , molecular responses to feeding and fasting exhibit temporal dynamics with a 24h period.

To monitor such daily temporal pattern Dr.Satchin Panda and his collegues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla , California have created a new smartphone app.

MyCircadianClock that allows users to track their daily health behaviors, including eating, sleeping, moving and taking suppliments and medications. The data gathered from the app is shared with researchers who are investigating how daily timing of these behavoirs influences health and wellbeing.

Users of the app gain personalized insights into their body's daily rhythms. The purpose of the app is to pilot a way to objectively study the effects of timing food intake in humans.

With enough subjects Dr. Satchin hopes to test the benefits of time-restricted feeding under different conditions of sleep, activity, and disease. In addition to cutting out some bad habits, he hypothesized that a timed feeding schedule could prevent metabolic jet lag when differences in day-to-day or weekday/weekend meal times cause metabolic organs to become out of sync with the body's overall circadian rhythms.