Sleep Statistics; are you interested?

The biggest change human beings have lived through in the last ten thousand years happened less than seventy years ago. Electricity and the widespread use of the lightbulb qualify along with the discovery of fire, the advent of agriculture, and the discovery of antibiotic treatment as a point of no return in human history.

In 1910, the average adult was still sleeping nine to ten hours a night. Now the average adult is lucky to get a full seven hours a night. Most of us don't. Those numbers add up to an extra five hundred waking hours a year. In nature, we would sleep 4,370 hours out of a possible 8,760, or half of our lives. Eighty years ago, we were down to 3,395 hours. Now we are lucky to get a measly 2,555. If nature keeps score, and we bet she does, that means we only get to live about half as long. We may have doubled that figure with surgery and antibiotics, but think how long we could live if we slept too.

In the 1970's, Americans devoted 27 hours a week to "leisure" time. In the 1990's, we're down to 15. And we work at least 48 hours a week, compared to 35 for the average worker in the 1970's. Then we had hobbies, we were players of baseball and builders of model ships, members of the garden club and Boy Scout troop leaders. Now, in the 1990's, and 2000s', although the number of hours we devote to work and leisure are approximately the same, the ratio has shifted considerably. In the thirty years since 1970, we've found new passions to add to the old duties--exercising, going ot the doctor, commuting through ever-increasing traffic, watching 150 channels, and real movies on cable TV, and high speed internet, Email, and eBay. No wonder there's no time left to sleep or take care of our children.

So why didn't the guardians of our health look at stress and lack of sleep before they placed the entire blame on food? Go figure. And even when they did examine the diet of Americans and offered advice, they got it BACKWARD. They told the public to eat sugar and avoid fat!!!

Sleeping controls eating, eating and stress control reproduction. Sleeping, eating, and making love control aging.

The hormones melatonin and prolactin are major players in your mind-body-planet connection. They communicate with your immune system and metabolic energy system about light-and-dark cycles. Insulin and prolactin orchestrate the brain chemistry governing serotonin and dopamine in your brain, to control your behavior and mood. Serotonin and dopamine control your behavior toward food and sex. Bottom line: Not enough sleep makes you fat, hungry, impotent, hypertensive, and cancerous, with a bad heart.

The sun's energy is the catalyst for all life. The amount of light that hits you informs your "system controls" about the rotation and orbit of the planet we live on. This global positioning helps our instincts to keep a bead on the food supply. It is this cosmic communication that has been telling us, since time began, when to eat, what to eat, and when to reproduce to maximize food availability. We and all other organisms on this planet evolved with the spin-in and out of the light of the sun.

The fact that you are reading this means the system was successful.

That fact that you want to read this means the system is breaking down.

Most Americans are sick and tired of watching their weight and worrying about their hearts.

The National Institutes of Health confirms that it is a scientific "given" that light and dark cycles

*Turn hormone production on and off
*Activate your immune system
*time neurotransmitter release daily, and especially seasonally.

The only person to benefit from sleeping is you.

Whether or not we want to go to bed earlier and work fewer hours is really what's at stake here. I know that 24 hour shopping centers, 900 channels of television, and Net surfing all night is appealing, but I'm just out to make going the way of the dinosaurs a PERSONAL choice, not a federal one. I think the public deserves the facts, and accurate nutritional advice, from our government.

Every American knows that Washington thrives on secrecy, but it's a little hard to swallow that while the surgeon general's office is telling the public to eat a low-fat, 58-percent carbohydrate diet to cure obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer literally ACROSS THE STREET the NIH is proving that it is the excessive consumption of carbohydrates brought about by sleep deprivation is among the causes those diseases.

We pay for it.

Call my office to set up an appointment or email me 815-476-5210 or jones.gretchen@gmail.com