Hello all,
While staying up too late, I've been reading:
Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, And Survival
By T. S. Wiley, Bent Formby
Pocket Books 2000 ( 368 pages, $24.95 )
Hardcover, ISBN: 0-671-03867-2
MEDICAL/Research
The authors explore the metabolic effects of light exposure (day length), sleep
(or lack), and their consequences for our paleolithic ancestors and us.
Regards, Mike
Chapter 1 excerpt is here:
http://www.simonsays.com/excerpt.cfm?isbn=0671038672
Some quotes from the excerpt:
"What if all those low-fat promises of a
long, cancer-free, diabetes-free life in a
beautiful, thin body, run by a strong, clear,
non-hypertensive heart, were bogus from
the start? What if carbohydrates, not fat,
were the cause of obesity, diabetes, and
cancer?"
"If you sleep at night for the number of
hours it would normally be dark outside,
you will only crave sugar in the summer,
when the hours of light are long. It is the
"perennial adaptation," or the chronic,
constant intent to hibernate, that causes
overconsumption of carbohydrates and
obesity and its attendant high blood
pressure, high cholesterol, and inevitable
heart failure."
"To understand why carbohydrates are the
instrument of death, we need just a little
science. Only recently have science and
medicine begun to acknowledge a
condition called chronic hyperinsulinemia.
That's the term for chronic high insulin
made in your own body. This can only
occur when you chronically consume
carbohydrates. You could never
chronically consume carbohydrates in
nature. Trees and plants fruit only in one
season and flower in the other."
"Your appetite is but one symptom of this
deathly dysfunction, just as obesity is
correlative with heart disease but is not the
cause. The real truth is that the urgent
need to sleep is also the cause of Type II
diabetes. All diseases that are not caused
by contagion and injury are born of
immune dysfunction by way of
metabolism. Your immune system is
governed by two substances: prolactin and
melatonin, and both of them are
controlled by light-and-dark cycles. It's
these major biological controls that are
deranged. Seasonal variation in daylight,
and intensity of daylight, control budding,
growth, and dormancy in plants and in
animals; seasonal changes in ambient
lighting control hibernation, migration,
and breeding. To expose ourselves to the
unremitting glare of artificial lighting for
more hours than it is actually daylight is
asking for trouble. Until seventy-five years
ago, we spent up to fourteen hours a night,
depending on the season, in the dark."
"It was a ridiculously bad piece of luck in an
otherwise pretty fair century that, at
exactly the same time that sugar started to
be used to process and preserve packaged
"food," we had the opportunity to stay up
all night and eat it."
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