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In most individuals, food intake occurs as discrete bouts or meals, and little attention has been paid to the factors that normally determine when meals will occur when food is freely available. On the basis of experiments using rats, the authors suggest that when there are no constraints on obtaining food and few competing activities, 3 levels of interacting controls normally dictate when meals will start. The first is the genetically determined circadian activity pattern on which nocturnal animals tend to initiate most meals in the dark. The second is the regularly occurring changing of the light cycle: These changes provide temporal anchors. The third relates to the size of the preceding meal, such that larger meals cause a longer delay until the onset of the next meal. Superimposed on these 3 are factors related to learning, convenience, and opportunity.

To investigate whether there is a circadian regulation of insulin secretion, rats were adapted to a feeding regimen of six meals equally distributed over 24 h. Under these conditions basal glucose and insulin levels increased during the light phase and decreased during the dark phase. Maximal blood glucose responses were fairly similar during the six different meals, but glucose increments were clearly delayed during the last two meals consumed during the light period. Insulin increments were highest during the dark phase and clearly diminished during the second half of the light phase. This situation was reversed when the scheduled meals were replaced by i.v. glucose infusions, i.e., no significant differences were detected between insulin responses, whereas glucose increments were reduced during the dark period. These results show that there is a circadian regulation of basal blood glucose and feeding-induced insulin responses, which is independent of the temporal distribution of feeding activity.

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