Fat, Sick and Addicted – Can You Solve Your Health Issues with Sleep?

Today, Super Bowl parties across the nation will begin. Lots of beer, snacks and fun to be had.

Will you stay up too late? Drink too much? Overindulge in salty, sugary snacks? How will you feel at work in the morning?

Is Thomas Edison to blame for all this?

The light bulb and other artificial lighting has changed our habits as humans. For thousands of years before light, we went to bed with the sunset. As a collective, we slept 12 hours per night, or half our lives.

According to the book “Lights Out: Sleep Sugar and Survival” by T.S. Wiley with Bent Formby (Pocket Books, 2000, ISBN 978-0-671-03868-7), in the last 70 years, humans’ sleep patterns have changed significantly and it’s affecting our overall health dramatically.

Can you imagine getting 9 hours of sleep a night? That’s what Wiley recommends for optimal health. According to Wiley, that much sleep could help prevent sugar addiction (and thus, adult-onset diabetes), cancer and other health ailments. Is that enough to convince you to turn off the lights and get to bed?

As recently as 100 years ago, we were getting 9-10 hours per night. That is now down to 7 hours average per night for most Americans.  That’s almost half the sleep our ancient ancestors were getting.

The artificial light also fools our bodies into thinking its summer all the time. Our bodies then naturally store fat to be used for more activity during longer days. Since most of us don’t actually burn off that extra fat, we get fat and stay fat.

While we think we are learning more and getting more done by staying up late behind our LED screens on email or Facebook or watching 150 cable channels, we are actually possibly making ourselves sick. “That’s why Americans are the brightest and the best as well as the sickest people in the world,” writes Wiley.

This artificial light also causes us to crave carbohydrates (or sugar) and so breaking the addiction to sugary and high-carb foods gets even more difficult when you don’t sleep 9-9 ½ hours per night. It makes it much more difficult to kick this habit.

Can’t get rid of that belly fat? It’s because our bodies think it is summer all the time. It makes us crave fatty foods to protect us from starvation. Your body secretes insulin until it becomes insulin-resistant. You then develop a “fat pad” around the middle of your body to protect your internal organs during the longer days of summer.

This addiction to sugar (almost all processed foods contain some form as a cheap preservative), insulin-resistance, fatty middle and less sleep also may be causing our enormous rise in cancer rates, according to Wiley. We are in systemic inflammation at all times which causes cellular mutations, including cancer.

So, how to solve this?

Sleep – lots of it. Sleep helps the release of many hormones to satisfy your body’s needs. Melatonin and prolactin help with immunity and metabolism. Insulin and prolactin help regulate serotonin and dopamine in your brains. Serotonin and dopamine helps control your desire for food and sex.

When you are deprived of these things due to lack of sleep, it makes you fat, hungry and lethargic. So, try it for a week – turn out the lights when your kids go to bed. See how you feel. What have you got to lose – besides a few pounds?