‘Zeitgebers’ - The Importance of Circadian Clock Timing in Cancer + Melatonin Supplementation

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 1:5

When people think about what supports the body through a cancer diagnosis, the list is fairly predictable. Nutrition, movement, the treatment protocol itself, maybe supplements or working with a psychotherapist. Almost nobody puts light on that list, and even fewer people put temperature on it. Yet these two things, light and temperature, are some of the most powerful levers we have over our own physiology, and there’s a growing body of oncology-specific research suggesting they aren’t a lifestyle nicety sitting outside ‘real’ treatment. They appear to be a legitimate co-factor in how the body copes with a diagnosis, tolerates treatment, and in some cases, how the disease itself behaves.

In German they’re called Zeitgebers, which translates as “time givers”. They’re the environmental cues that calibrate the body’s internal clock, and for someone navigating cancer, that clock isn’t just running your sleep. It’s running immune surveillance, inflammatory tone, hormone release, and as I’ll get into appears to be genuinely entangled with how some cancers progress.

We all carry a master regulator clock inside us. It sits in a tiny cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the SCN. Underneath the SCN sit smaller peripheral clocks running in nearly every organ and tissue the liver, the gut, the skin, and, interestingly, in many tumors themselves. Each peripheral clock keeps its own time but takes its orders from the SCN above it, and the SCN itself runs almost entirely on what it’s told by the light you expose yourself to.

Something I love to think about is that we are, in a very real sense, just very complicated houseplants. A leaf uses chlorophyll to trap light and turn it into the energy that keeps the plant alive. Our red blood cells carry haemoglobin, and haemoglobin is based on the same pyrrole ring structure as chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the green pigment in plants and consists of a ring structure built around magnesium at the centre, where hemoglobin is built around iron.

If you’re dealing with cancer and are looking for an integrative oncology practitioner, I am now taking on new patients from September. For more information contact: admin@amandakingnd.com

In this article learn how to intentionally SET your own Zeitgebers and optimize this essential aspect of your own terrain, in both cancer prevention and health optimization.

Learn what interrupts your circadian rhythm and how to avoid sabotaging your own efforts.