Lights Out by T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby said:
The disastrous slide in the health of the American people corresponds to the increase in light-generating night activities and the carbohydrate consumption that follows. Just consider the increase in the average weight of young adults and teens over the last fifteen to twenty years. It has, predictably, increased by more than ten pounds. The percentage of overweight teens rested at 15 percent in the 1970s and rose to 21 percent by 1991. Now it's up to 30 percent.
A recent front-page article in The New York Times cited television as the cause of the increase of obesity in young people. Its claim rested solely on the "couch potato" premise, pleading a lack of activity (exercise). It is TV, all right—but not the way they think. Most young people today were born into a low-fat/ heavy-exercise world. More than a third of them are self-declared vegetarians and bikers and hikers and Rollerbladers. There are approximately 12.5 million of them in America today. These young adults, when asked why they're vegetarians, predominantly say it's for their health; the rest just think it's cool. They have no idea what they're doing to themselves.
THE ENDLESS SUMMER SYNDROME
Besides a steady increase in heart disease and obesity, statistics already show that diabetes and cancer are also on the rise.
Maybe it's not just the food.
In the January 12, 1998, issue of U.S. News and World Report, the head of the Harvard School of Public Health's department of nutrition, a very fickle man, Walter Willet, was queried about a low-fat diet's failure to cure any diseases or save any lives. His weak reply, "It was just a hypothesis tc begin with," showed no shame.
That hypothesis has cost more lives than the last two world wars and the Vietnam conflict put together. Just check the American Cancer Society's and American Heart Association's statistics for the last three decades In 1999, it was predicted that 1,257,800 people would die from cancer alone.
If you'd like a future projection, check the American Diabetes Association's mystifying numbers on the growing population of Type II diabetics. Now researchers are on the lookout for genetic markers for obesity, because if there's anything we're sure of, it's that obesity is the beginning of the end. Obesity is the precursor for adult-onset diabetes. It's no coincidence that in the year 2000 there will be more than 25 million Type II diabetics. That's about 98 percent of the entire diabetic population. If all 25 million become diabetic, then a great proportion of them will certainly have heart disease and high blood pressure, two conditions that lead to stroke. Those complications are the leading killers of diabetics.
It's been predicted for years now that reducing dietary fat would decrease cancer, but cancer statistics show us an increasing incidence of colon cancer with an associated decrease in death. That means colon cancer is increasing, but people are dying from it less often. This is not a cure. For breast and prostate cancer, both increased incidence and increased death can be seen. These numbers on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer are the ones that, most certainly, should have shown a drop, given all the dietary changes Americans have made in the last fifteen years. Instead of acknowledging low-fat's defeat, medical research gave us Mevacor, Provachol, Proscar, and now Tamoxifen and Raloxifene.
Medicine admits that the "improvement" in cancer statistics is derived from early detection, not from treatment or prevention. But early detection only extends the time of awareness—the victim just knows sooner that he or she is going to suffer and die. It doesn't actually change the date of death. Early detection never saves lives; more often it only prolongs them long enough to skew the numbers. All these numbers prove that we're on the wrong course. We agree that dietary intervention certainly can reverse the course of disease. Cutting carbohydrates would cure obesity and most diabetes, but not heart disease, and certainly not all cancer. The end of this story lies in extinction.
Food is part of the equation, all right, but it is not the answer. The answer lies in circadian rhythmicity and evolution.
The answer is to eat and sleep and reproduce in sync with the spin of the planet or go the way of the dinosaurs. The long hours of artificial light that confuse your ancient energy regulation system also destroy the lining of your heart, so excess cholesterol can obstruct blood flow. Your subconscious has, over the course of evolution, been conditioned and fine-tuned to believe and act on the following when the lights stay on too long: "Eat carbohydrates now or die later." Your subconscious, too, has, over the course of evolution, been conditioned and fine-tuned to believe and act on the following when the lights stay on too long: "Mate or die.” This light-responsive instinct has been the basis of our feast-or-famine metabolism and ultimate survival for at least 3 million years. All the effects of chronic light exposure and the carbohydrate consumption that follows that exposure would have, in another place and time, prepared us for the worst—for no food and for the shorter, darker, colder days of less sun.
We have always "feasted" to endure the "famine" that always fol-lowed—until now. Unfortunately, the truth in our time is that we eat carbohydrates now and die sooner. Your body translates long hours of artificial light into summertime. Because it instinctively knows that summer comes before winter, and that winter means no available food, you begin to crave carbohydrates so you can store fat for a time when food is scarce and you should be hibernating. This is the formula:
A. Long hours of artificial light = summer in your head
B. Winter signifies famine to your internal controls
C. Famine on the horizon signifies instinctive carbohydrate craving to store fat for hibernation and scarcity
This storage is accomplished by:
1. Increasing carbohydrate consumption until your body responds
to all the insulin by becoming insulin-resistant in muscle tissue;
2. Ensuring that the carbohydrates taken in end up as a fat pad;
3. Prompting the liver to dump the extra sugar into cholesterol production, which will keep cell membranes from freezing at low temperatures.
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.
Steps 1, 2, and 3 also correspond to the hormonal portrait of Type II diabetes—a disease that, in truth, is the end result of excruciating fatigue from light "toxicity." On the way to the end, you'll definitely encounter one of the following—obesity, heart disease, stroke, mental illness, or cancer. The medical community, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, and your TV will tell you that the cause is a plague from the great beyond that can only be cured by an 80-percent nonfat diet, at least three to six hours of exercise a week, and a cadre of supplements and vitamins.
Who are you going to believe?
The market is saturated with information on low-fat diets: how to eat N low-fat, why to eat low-fat, who should eat low-fat. There are only a few dissenting opinions, though the numbers are growing every day. It's slowly leaking into the American consciousness that "for some people, low-fat may not be the best choice;' according to Walter Willet. This half-mumbled, hedged recant is too little, too late for those we knew who didn't live through the low-fat movement.
This national health catastrophe has, in real time, been at least seventy-five years in the making. In all those years, countless souls have struggled and failed to follow nutritional advice that never could have led to success. They failed because it was never really about food. We know from history that the diseases of civilization all hit hard after the Industrial Revolution, when electricity made the potential of unlimited cheap artificial light possible. It was the electric lightbulb that turned night into day. The price-performance curve for the lightbulb mirrors the price-performance curve for the laptop computer. A 100-watt bulb costs 33 cents at any Home Depot. In 1883, the same amount of light would have cost the consumer $1,445. The experts have concluded that machines usurped our physical well-being; in reality, it was the refined and sugared processed food that became part of our lives for the first time, at the same time as the lights extended our day and changed our appetites, that did it. Although the instrument of destruction may be food, the cause of death is something much more insidious.
CAUSES OF DEATH
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.
By the 1920s, most people could afford to keep the lights on for a couple of hours at night after sunset. They could afford a couple of Edison's new light "bulbs" and the electricity to keep them on because the same energy source was building an economy that utilized an enormous workforce. The lights brought jobs to pay for the lights. By the late 1920s, expensive machinery in factories had begun to hum around the clock. Suddenly they were running twenty-four hours a day, when, only a decade before, gaslight was too expensive to use all night. Before electricity, factories ran only ten hours a day. This second Industrial Revolution remapped the economic landscape.
Night-shift work brought more money in countless ways. Not only did it line the pockets of the factory owners, it also provided more jobs and money to an economic underclass of new immigrants. But, more important, night-shift work brought a service economy with it. That service economy spawned transportation, all-night places to eat and all-night grocery stores, night tennis courts and baseball games, gambling joints, and on and on. The electricity powered the telephone. which is the basis of our present science-fiction communications capacity, which has allowed small markets to become global markets. There's even a new piece of terminology in our language for this phenomenon, thanks to the Internet—twenty-four/seven. 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.
Granted, there weren't a lot of packaged foods on the market at that point, but the ones that were on the market used highly refined (by machine) corn syrup to prevent moisture loss and extend shelf life. Most packaged foods still do. Even the shrink-wrapped whole-grain low-fat honey-sweetened bran muffins you find next to the cash register in the mini-mart have been preserved with sugar. It's illuminating to note here that the incidence of Type II diabetes dropped sharply during World War I and World War II, when sugar was rationed.
THE INSTRUMENT OF DEATH
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. Living on sugar for more than a month or two in a row would not be possible unless you were preparing to hibernate like a woodchuck for a long winter nap.
The media doesn't talk much about insulin unless it's reporting on Type I diabetes, so most people know insulin as a medicine for Type I diabetics, who for reasons that are viral or autoimmune in origin can no longer make their own insulin. The diseases known as Type I and Type II diabetes are both characterized by uncontrollable blood sugar.
Insulin is at the center of both forms of the disease because it controls blood sugar by binding to cell receptor sites like a key opening a lock. Once the floodgates are open, the blood sugar can enter and energize all of your cells. Insulin resistance is the body's inability to respond to the insulin that you normally produce because receptors have retreated to save your life. Every function of your body, from basic molecule-to-molecule communication to complex operations like appetite control or temperature regulation, is in a tight zone of normalcy called homeostasis. The retreat of your insulin receptors is an attempt to control how much sugar is allowed in. Too much is not normal.
The telling clue to our impending doom is that the incidence of insulin resistance is occurring in younger and younger people. The entire population is aging in "fast forward." The logical response would be to retool all the food factories and advise people to cut out sugar, right? That's the approach we took with fat and the population fell right in line. Believe us, it wouldn't be as easy with sugar. It would be more like Prohibition. We are as addicted to a low-fat, high-sugar diet as alcoholics are to alcohol, because high insulin levels create the same brain state as alcohol does.
Alcoholics "sleep it off" after a binge, not only because the alcohol itself has a drug-like effect on their opiate receptors but also because the huge carbohydrate load of the grape, grain, potato, cactus, or, in the case of rum, sugar cane in the drink literally puts them to sleep. Remember this as you go for that glass of wine after dinner. The spike of insulin after a binge makes the serotonin in the brain turn into melatonin and it's lights out. In our culture, we take in as much carbohydrate in a day as a rummy on a binge. For him and us, the natural recovery is the same.
Sleep it off.
RESURRECTION OF THE TRUTH
Could it really be the loss of sleep destroying the endocrine clock that controls weight gain? Could how much you sleep really control your appetite? Our findings are almost too simple and extraordinary to believe. But here, we remind you of the legendary rule of Occam's razor which states: "All things being equal; the simplest answer is always the correct one." We know that, for most of you, what we're telling you is like finding out that everything you've grown up believing is a lie. Well, it is Don't you want to know?
It turns out that everything we've come to know as fact about our health turns out to be no more than wild conjecture. Conjecture that has no science to support it. Conjecture that, to some people, made sense.
Not anymore.
