Lights Out : Sleep, Sugar, and Survival

Rating:
Summary: Part Fact/Part Guesstimation - Fun and informative
Review: Alot of the information presented concerning evolution is unsubstantiated, and untrue, however the information about light poisoning and lack of quality, timly sleep is probably absolutely correct. The writing dragged a bit and was somewhat repetitive but, I enjoyed the colorful terminology. I wish Ms. Wiley had given better references for her suppositions.

I read the book 2 weeks ago. Since that time, I have made several changes in my sleep habits. I have painted my bedroom walls dark colors instead of the glaring, bright white they were. I keep the lights in the house somewhat dimmed after dark. I covered all the red, green and blue lights (I didnt realize there were so many lite sources in my bedroom) on the clocks, vcr, telephones ect, in my room.

I immediately started trying to get that recommended 9.5 hours of sleep. Today is the first day that I have been able to sleep the full nine and a half hours in almost complete darkness. It was difficult to build up from 7 hrs to 9.5. I do feel better, and I find myself getting more things done during the day. I am even more emotionally calm, and believe that my BP has gone down. I fully anticipate losing weight by sleeping more and giving my body time to repair itself, and, am looking forward to Ms. Wiley's next literary effort.

Rating:
Summary: A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT YOUR LIFE ... AND HOW TO LIGHT IT
Review: Even before it was officially published, the book woke up medical and government experts, some of whom ere shocked, stunned and surprised by authors/researchers T.S.
Wiley and Bent Formby's claims that 9.5 hours of sleep a night can lower blood pressure, erase depression, prevent cancer and help people lose weight. (Their theory, in a much
reduced nutshell: Our physiology has been programmed since Day One to eat and breed in sync with seasonal variations in light exposure; in other words, "with the invention of the light bulb 70 years ago, we fundamentally altered this delicate biological rhythm.") Why have we been kept in the dark about such supposed healthy connections? The answers are here, along with various tips and tricks, secrets and suggestions. These guys have done their homework --- their notes and resources make up a third of the book's 350 pages --- but before stocking up on room-darkening shades and tossing all those three-ways, spend time carefully reading their claims. Then ask your doctor. And shrink.

Rating:
Summary: Fun to read and it helped my blood sugar!
Review: I covered all the light sources in my bedroom and started using pink tinted glasses to work on the computer after 9 p.m. (I work nights). This helped my insulin resistance problem immediately. Before I started doing this, I had to eat every 2 and a half hours during the day. Now, I can go 4 hours without eating. I have not been able to increase the number of hours I sleep, but the quality of sleep seems to be better. The book is written with a "Far Side" style of humor and made it easier to get through all the information presented.

Rating:
Summary: Important Information, yet terribly written
Review: I have to agree exactly with Leslie of Texas' review below.

The basic information and premise of the book - that staying up late decreases production of melatonin in our bodies, and messes up our hormone system's balance in other ways as well - is potentially crucial to our health. That is why I give this book 4 stars, despite the terrible writing.

The author has a writing style that I believe comes from not really understanding much of what she is writing - I was particularly struck by the sentence in the Acknowledgements thanking her daughter for spending "countless hours explaining physics, chemistry and math to her old mom". This was a surprising admission, considering that a good portion of the book attempts to lecture the reader about a variety of unrelated topics that are not really understood by the author (or any other pop science writers) - including chaos theory and many other recent areas of scientific thought, taken wildly out of context.

The important information to get out of the book, is that 10 years of research at the National Institute of Health have confirmed that modern man's tendency to go to sleep much later than sunset disrupts the body's natural cycles, and this causes a variety of health problems due to the effects on the critical hormone system of the human body. Levels of melatonin, prolaction, leptin, cortisol, insulin, dopamine and serotonin are all affected.

The essential recommendation of the book is - during fall and winter - to try and get at least 9.5 hours of sleep by going to sleep as soon as possible after sunset (ie by 9 or 10 pm), and the rest of the year to also try and get to sleep as soon as possible after sunset.

The other recommendations are the same as can be found in the books by Drs. Eades, ie follow a low-carbohydrate diet and do weight lifting exercise instead of aerobics.

I agree that it is unfortunate that this important research is presented in such a poorly written fashion, and mixed up with so much extraneous opinion.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful book
Review: I read many books on nutrition, health, biochemistry, etc and found this to be singularly one of the most important I have ever read (I'm no slouch either, BA and BS from an Ivy and a masters in engineering.) The scope is daunting, in fact, there are at least four other books in here wanting to get out. I'm grateful for the exposure to these subjects, there were times when associates were made that blew me away. I think what most people were looking for was the usual here are the ten things you need to do and here's the selective studies we've picked out to support our hypothesis and you'll look and feel great. So, yes, to all the complainers out there, the editing wasn't quite up to the task, the publisher wanted this to be all things. READ THIS BOOK ANYHOW! It's good to take a look at the dominant paradigms and wonder how they got that way, truth is a squishy thing, even in the lab. READ THIS BOOK!

Rating:
Summary: Fun to read and it helped my blood sugar!
Review: I really enjoyed the book, though I think it could have been written a little less complicated.
Last night we watched a show called Pilot Guides on OLN, where Ian Wright went to Armenia and Georgia. He visited a hilltown in Georgia with no electricity that was snowed in 8 months of the year. The people looked very healthy. They seemed to be living the lifestyle proposed in the book. It would be interesting if a study was done of these people to prove the research.

Rating:
Summary: Junk Science
Review: I really wanted to like this book; the effect of light pollution on our health has been an area of interest to me for several years. Unfortunately, this book's attempt to prove the connection between modern human diseases and artificial light falls well short of the mark. It is poorly written, badly edited, and very badly end noted (many bold assertions are not supported at all).

It is also full of some real faux-factual zingers, my favourite being on page 27 of the hard cover version: "We were born, like every other animal, to hunt in the light - whether it be for fruit and fish in the summer or wild pig and bark in the winter - and to rest in the dark". This statement may be true for humans, but it ignores opportunistic predators that are as adept hunting at night as they are in the day, and the tens of thousands of species that are specialized nocturnal hunters. By that point I was starting to seriously question the credibility of the authors, and it's the first chapter!

The biggest problem with the theories in this book are that they all emanate from a flawed central model. The authors idea is that artificial light fools our bodies into acting as if we are living in a perpetual summer, and therefore storing fat in preparation for hibernation. It is true that technology has very recently changed our environment while our bodies are still basically those of our Paleolithic ancestors. However, the problem with their theory is that our Paleolithic ancestors evolved in equatorial Africa, and did not hibernate. In fact, only recently is there evidence that any primates hibernate at all, and these are Lemurs in Madagascar who do so in response to changes in temperature that indicate the start of a drought, not changes in the length of day. (...)

It is no surprise that the bibliography lists `The Lucifer Principle' as one of its sources. Another, though far more entertaining, junk-science gem.


Rating:
Summary: Someone needs to write this book; Obviously T.S. Wiley can't
Review: Pocket Books should be ashamed of publishing such a badly-written horribly edited book. Really too bad because I think the theories deserve some real thought and documented research. One hundred pages of references doesn't mean a thing if you can't line up a fact with a reference (who did the research that says we only get one billion heart beats?). A 30-page glossary seems nice, but the 2 words I tried to find weren't in there, and I'm sure some that are there aren't in the book. One of the final chapters mentions an appendix twice -- but the book has no appendix! Minor, but showing how badly this book wasn't edited, the last page (About the Authors) has the title of the book wrong!
Although this book was very, very frustrating to read, I wanted to learn what it has to teach. I wish I knew which parts were from real science and which were pulled out of hats. Reviewers who say it is an easy read couldn't have tried to understand all the words ... for example, in one page, she discusses Newtonian physics, Quantum physics, supersymmetry and string theory AND Chaos theory. She may use simple words, but her thoughts ping-pong around through complex and questionable ideas and trying to "connect the dots" and discern the truth make in-depth reading very slow and frustrating.

T.S. Wiley should have hired a ghost writer. Hopefully someone else will write this book the right way and help us see what in here is fact.

Rating:
Summary: Pseudo-scientific ...
Review: The main premise of this book is that artificial lighting tricks our bodies into thinking it's a permanent summer, so we binge on carbohydrates to prepare for a hungry winter that never comes. However, we have four seasons, not two, and animals fatten up for the winter in the fall, when daylight hours are decreasing, not in summer. For example, bears, the champion hibernators, prefer carrion (meat) and fats in the summer, but gorge on fruits and other carbohydrates in the fall.

In just the first chapter of this book, I lost count of how many times the authors made statements I knew to be wrong or knew counterexamples for, cited a statistic to "prove" an unrelated fact, or used statistics in a meaningless way. Sprinkled throughout the book are examples that infer causality from correlation.

For example, they repeatedly mention that exercise and low-fat eating have taken hold with large parts of the American population, while diabetes, cancer, and heart disease keep rising. This doesn't prove anything - do people who exercise get these diseases at the same rate as people who do not?

The authors repeatedly state that running and other vigorous exercise cause a terror reaction in humans, even though we run while hunting but cannot outrun most predators.

On page 175 they cited the "Eskimo" (Inuit) diet as an example of how good low-carb, high-fat, high-protein diets are for you... even though these high-latitude peoples are certainly not sleeping in tune with sunrise and sunset. A more likely answer is that thousands of generations of natural selection have produced Inuit who can thrive on such a diet, especially given the physical work that goes into sustaining their lifestyle.

There are no references to mid-latitude peoples who choose to live without artificial lighting, such as many Amish and Mennonite groups. I'd be curious to know what their obesity and disease prevalences are. Cultures that take siestas would be another obvious group to test these hypotheses against.

There is an extensive bibliography, but they are sorted alphabetically by chapter, with no cross-referencing, making it nearly impossible to verify any given statement.

The clever mix of conventional and uncontroventional premises makes it difficult to sort out truth from untruth. It's well-accepted that modern high-sugar diets and stressful living are unhealthy. It's certainly true that many low-fat foods are no healthier, since they replace fat with sugar.

It may well be true that sleep problems are a cause and not an effect of modern illnesses, but the authors of this book chose to write a pseudo-scientific book promoting yet another low-carb panacea diet rather than any kind of proof of their premise.

Rating:
Summary: Screw Loose: Truth, Irrelevancy, and Rambling
Review: Wacko, but worth reading. Wiley and Formby presented important research involving sleep and survival. The studies with short-night/long-night mice and cancer were revealing. Hopefully young medical students will read and repeat these studies with mouse models of other diseases, like Parkinsons and Lou Gehrig's.

Notwithstanding Formby's credentials and Wiley'sresearch in endocrinology, the authors lost credibility by making flippant reocmmendations to drink coffee and smoke cigars. The discussion of research reinforced only thier assertions regarding carbohydrates vs. protein, and the dangers of sleeping out of sync with the circadian rhythms of the planet.

The dicsussion of exercise was one-sided. Hysterical exercising might become stressful to the body, but the authors didn't discuss the many activities all animals do that increase the heart rate: playing, sparring, dancing, working, hunting, etc.

The material often got off the subject and became tiresome. Just when I was expecting a good conclusion, in almost the last paragraph, they forced in some anecdote about the surfacing of JFK's casket in the ocean.

The book was also poorly edited. I found a typo in the second page of introduction. It was one-third references, but had no footnotes.

I imagined a very pushy personality behind the writing. Also in the introduction was the imperative, "Listen Up!." OK, now I'm listening real close. So I begin to "hear" two or three one-line paragraphs per page, thrown in like punch lines to make the story seem more intense.