Food against jet lag, or How to deal with the problem of air travel

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The ability to travel in a matter of hours to the other end of the world has radically changed the whole picture of the world. Now we can travel without wasting time on a difficult and monotonous road, we can visit our relatives and friends, just buying a plane ticket. And at the same time, people are faced with a new problem that they did not even know about before - jet lag, or a failure of the circadian rhythm.

Jet lag is an English word created from two parts: jet “jet plane” + lag “lag”. Jetlag occurs in a person after he has to quickly cross several time zones. Depending on the initial state of health of a person, as well as where exactly he flew - to the east or to the west - jet lag can be expressed simply by insomnia / drowsiness at the "wrong" time, or by a whole set of symptoms: fatigue, headache, loss of appetite, difficulty faking on tasks, disorientation and even depression.

Such unpleasant symptoms can last for several days. At this time, a person is trying hard to sleep off and join the new rhythm of life, but all the rhythms of his body, such as the production of melatonin, a decrease in body temperature, and others, do not coincide with the world around him. A shift of one to two hours is usually more or less imperceptible, but a flight across 12 time zones can knock a person out of action for several days.

It is good if there is an opportunity after the flight to spend a few days to “recover”. However, if such a flight is part of the job, then such an opportunity is often not available. And the first to feel the need to find a solution to this problem were the military.

It was the military who were most interested in solving the jetlag problem. And it was they who in 2002 participated in an organized experiment on a possible way out of the circadian failure. The experiment was based on an old report that was published back in the 1980s. Then the scientist Charles Ehret published his book, in which he argued that you can overcome jet lag with the help of … diet.

In the 2002 experiment, 186 soldiers took part - not so many by the standards of scientists, but enough to see if this method has any effect at all. Some of the soldiers - the control group - went through several time zones without preparation, and some - followed the so-called Argonne diet 4 days before (since Charles Eret's research was done at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois).

The Argonne Diet should be started four days before departure. Eat heavily on the first day, with a preference for meat dishes for breakfast and lunch, and high-carb foods like pasta or potatoes for dinner. On the second day, you should eat only light food - salads, toasts, cereals without milk and butter. On the third day, again meat for breakfast and lunch, and carbohydrates for dinner, and on the fourth - this is the day of departure - again only light food.

However, WHAT you eat is only half the secret. The second important factor in the Argon Diet is the TIME of eating. Starting from its first day, you should eat not when you are used to, but when it is done at the destination.

Let's say you are flying from Moscow to New York. If you usually eat breakfast at 8 am, then on the first day of the diet you should shift your breakfast to 4 pm, since the time difference between these cities is 8 hours. Accordingly, lunch instead of 12-00 will be at 20-00, and dinner at midnight.

Another main point of the Argorny diet is that any energy and stimulating drinks, be it tea or coffee, can be drunk all four days only from 15 to 17 of your time zone.

Eating on such a schedule is inconvenient, but much less problematic for health than the jet lag itself. By the fourth day, your body will have time to adjust to the new schedule, so when you arrive at your destination, it will be much easier to adapt.

So, the same experiment in 2002 on the military showed that those soldiers who followed such a diet experienced 16 times less jet lag symptoms. These results were enough for the military to continue to use just such training before deploying over long distances.

There is also a shorter but less studied way to deal with jetlag - this is a kind of shortened version of the Argon Diet. The day before the flight, you should eat only light food, and 15 hours before departure, completely refuse to eat and drink only water - no tea, coffee or sugary drinks. Your body may not have time to completely reorganize to a new rhythm, but this will get rid of most of the negative symptoms of jet lag.

And if this diet is short-term and is designed to help cope with temporary difficulties, then most diets are still aimed at adjusting weight, and sometimes they can be very questionable diets. We wrote about the strangest of them in our article. "In pursuit of beauty: strange diets with which you can ruin yourself from the light."