Sleep is More Important than Food

Say you decide to go on a fast, and so you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of seven days, how would you be feeling? You’d probably be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner. But basically you’d be fine.

Now let’s say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week. Not so good. After several days, you’d be almost completely unable to function. That’s why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

So why is sleep one of the first things we’re willing to sacrifice as the demands in our lives keep rising? We continue to live by a remarkably durable myth: sleeping one hour less will give us one more hour of productivity. In reality, the research suggests that even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, our cognitive capacity and our productivity.

Many of the effects we suffer are invisible. Insufficient sleep, for example, deeply impairs our ability to consolidate and stabilize learning that occurs during the waking day. In other words, it wreaks havoc on our memory.

So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours. That means just 2.5 percent of us require less than 7 hours of sleep a night to feel fully rested. That’s 1 out of every 40 people.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

More than one-third of American adults wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Of those who experience “nocturnal awakenings,” nearly half are unable to fall back asleep right away. Doctors frequently diagnose this condition as a sleep disorder called “middle-of-the-night insomnia,” and prescribe medication to treat it.

Mounting evidence suggests, however, that nocturnal awakenings aren’t abnormal at all; they are the natural rhythm that your body gravitates toward.

According to historians and psychiatrists alike, it is the compressed, continuous eight-hour sleep routine to which everyone aspires today that is unprecedented in human history. We’ve been sleeping all wrong lately — so if you have “insomnia,” you may actually be doing things right.

“The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic,” Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University. “Humans slept in two four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time some might stay in bed, pray, think about their dreams, or talk with their spouses. Others might get up and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep.”

{ Life’s Little Mysteries | Continue reading }

photo { french zoo, 2001; i took the photo }

related { How losing just a few hours of sleep can take years off your life }

{ Okinawans are among the world’s longest-lived people. More important, elders living in this lush subtropical archipelago tend to enjoy years free from disabilities. Okinawans have a fifth the heart disease, a fourth the breast and prostate cancer, and a third less dementia than Americans. A lean diet may be a factor. “A heaping plate of Okinawan vegetables, tofu, miso soup, and a little fish or meat will have fewer calories than a small hamburger,” says Makoto Suzuki. “And it will have many more healthy nutrients.” What’s more, many Okinawans who grew up before World War II never developed the tendency to overindulge. They still live by the Confucian-inspired adage “hara hachi bu–eat until your stomach is 80 percent full.” | National Geographic | Continue reading }

{ For one month, the ants, which usually thrive on seeds, are being fed a steady diet of McDonald’s Happy Meals. They even get the toys. The ants are housed in a roughly 6-by-10-foot plexiglass farm that is packed with Perlite pebbles and sealed with clear packing tape and nylon panty hose. Elizabeth Demaray, an artist based in Brooklyn, worked hand in hand with Dr. Christine Johnson, a scientific assistant at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in ant research. | NY Times, 2010 | Continue reading }

{ More than half of the women in a recently published survey reported that near the end of their pregnancies, they took it upon themselves to try to induce labor, mostly by walking, having sex, eating spicy food or stimulating their nipples. | Ohio State University | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

The potentially lasting implications of day-to-day couple conflict on physical and mental well-being are revealed in a study published today in the journal Personal Relationships. (…)

The study found that all participants across the sample as a whole experienced sleep disruption after conflict. There was however the greatest degree of sleep disruption amongst individuals who were highly anxious in their relationship. The lowest degree of sleep disruption was found amongst individuals who strongly avoided emotional attachment.

Conflict was also found to have repercussions for next-day mood. However, some participants found their mood negatively affected more than others. Individuals more at ease with emotional attachment found their mood was affected more than did individuals less comfortable being intimate with others.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

It was 1985. I was 12 and standing next to my mother in a police station in Greenwich Village. She was a pretty red-haired gal in her late 30s, but the three police officers she was talking to weren’t looking at her. They were looking at the bag of crack vials she had in her hands, confused about what they were. I wasn’t confused. We had a lot of crack vials in our apartment at that point. Hundreds of them. My brothers and I played with them in Washington Square Park. We carried them around in our pockets the way other kids carried marbles.

I didn’t know then that this encounter would inspire a movement; that a group of local mothers would decide to do what the befuddled police would not: reclaim Washington Square Park from the drug dealers. (…)

My parents moved into our apartment at 32 Washington Square West in 1975. Over the next decade we watched as an army of dealers and their customers took over the heart of Greenwich Village. As a kid, I knew you didn’t ride your bicycle into the park, because a junkie would take it from you. The park’s arch, built as an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, was covered in graffiti. When the city painted over it in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch applied the last stroke of white paint, then remarked, “That’ll last about an hour.”

{ John Carney/NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Kathe Kollwitz, Death and a Woman Struggling for a Child, 1911 }

Synthetic drugs that use legal compounds but mimic the highs of everything from marijuana to cocaine are proliferating among do-it-yourself pharma labs across the country. Bad trips—and fatal side effects—are increasing, too.

{ BusinessWeek | Continue reading }

bonus:

Is Aging a Disease?

One argument against treating aging is that it is not a disease. To an extent, this view stems from the fact that the word aging refers to different things. One is the experience of the passage of time. Another is the acquisition of experience and wisdom that can come from living long. To avoid confusion with these benign aspects, biologists use the term “senescence” for the increasing frailty and risk of disease and death that come with aging. Put more precisely, then, the question at hand is this: Is human senescence a disease?

One approach to defining illness has been to compare a given condition to good health. Is someone’s condition typical of a person of a given gender or age? For instance, the possession of ovaries is healthy for a woman, but not a man. Likewise, one might consider muscle wasting to indicate serious disease in a 20-year-old, but not a 90-year-old. Given that everyone who lives long enough will eventually experience senescence, I can appreciate the view that it is a normal condition and therefore not pathological. Still, from my perspective as someone working on the biological basis of aging, it is hard not to see it as a disease.

Senescence is a process involving dysfunction and deterioration at the molecular, cellular and physiological levels. This endemic malfunction causes diseases of aging. Even if one ages well, escaping the ravages of cancer or type II diabetes, one still dies in the end, and one dies of something. Moreover, in evolutionary terms, aging appears to serve no real purpose, meaning it does not contribute to evolutionary fitness. Why, then, has aging evolved?

The main theory dates back to the 1930s and was developed by J. B. S. Haldane and, later, Peter Medawar—both of University College London—and by the American biologist George C. Williams of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. It argues that aging reflects the decline in the force of natural selection against mutations that exert harmful effects late in life. An inherited mutation causing severe pathology in childhood will reduce the chances of reproduction and so disappear from the population. By contrast, another mutation with similar effects—but which surfaces after a person’s reproductive years—is more likely to persist. Natural selection can even favor mutations that enhance fitness early in life but reduce late-life health. This is because the early-life effects of genes have much stronger effects on fitness. Consequently, populations accumulate mutations that exert harmful effects in late life, and the sum of these effects is aging. Here evolutionary biology delivers a grim message about the human condition: Aging is essentially a multifactor genetic disease. It differs from other genetic diseases only in that we all inherit it. This universality does not mean that aging is not a disease. Instead, it is a special sort of disease.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

photo { Noritoshi Hirakawa }

We are prejudiced against all kinds of other people, based on superficial physical features: We react negatively to facial disfigurement; we avoid sitting next to people who are obese, or old, or in a wheelchair; we favor familiar folks over folks that are foreign. (…)

It makes immediate sense that people would develop aversions against people who actually have infectious diseases. But why does it also lead to these aversions to perfectly healthy people? Because it’s impossible to directly detect the presence of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic parasites; and so we’re forced to use crude superficial cues. Consequently, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes lead to the irrational avoidance of things (including people) that pose no infection risk at all.

Here’s an example: Animal feces is loaded with parasites that can make you ill. So if something looks like a pile of dog poop, you probably won’t eat it. That’s smart. But what if I took some delicious chocolate fudge and molded it into the shape of poop? Research by Paul Rozin and his colleagues shows that a lot of people still won’t eat it – even though they know it’s fudge! These people aren’t responding to any rational appraisal of infection risk; they are responding – automatically and aversively – to appearances.

The same principle applies in our interactions with other people.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Nicolas Silberfaden }

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating condition affecting millions everyday. It is estimated that, in the UK, 2% of people aged between 18 and 56 suffer from some form of obsessive compulsive behaviour. Despite this widespread occurrence, however, there is much we do not know about the condition.

Historically, OCD has been dismissed as having no physiological cause, but scientists have shown that there are underlying biological factors in the condition.

{ B Good Science | Continue reading }

Swallowing is a complex maneuver designed to pass food and drink safely into the stomach without the bolus taking an abberrant path into the adjacent airway. (…)

Fortunately for most of us, several safety mechanisms exist to prevent pretzels, and other detritus, from entering the airway, but given the open proximity of our airway to our food pathway, the risk of aspiration, albeit a subtle one, always exists. Ever notice that you’re unable to breath while swallowing? This is because the vocal folds adduct, closing and protecting the airway during the act of swallowing. This is but one safety feature when swallowing, but it demonstrates that respiration and swallowing must act in a coordinated fashion to prevent aspiration.

There is evidence that what we eat, how much we eat at a time and how fast we eat it affects our respiration, which in turn affects how the swallow is executed.

{ Slowdog | Continue reading }

follow-up:

We speculate that mobile phones negatively affect sperm quality in men and may impair male fertility. Men with poor sperm quality planning for pregnancy should be advised not to use cell phone extensively.

{ Neurotic Physiology | Continue reading }

Do mobile phones cause cancer?

The International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organisation, convened a panel of 31 experts to look at the available evidence. Their verdict: “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” – the sort given off by mobile phones – belong to “Group 2B”, which means that they “possibly” cause cancer in humans.

{ Cancer Research UK | Continue reading }

Scientists have found that you can double your chances of reaching your target weight if you get between six and eight hours sleep a night.

If you have any more, you will become too inactive and if you have any less your stress levels will increase along with cravings for unhealthy food.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

artwork { Gerhard Richter }

{ I’ve just come across a deeply disturbing paper: Attempted ignition of petrol vapour by lit cigarettes and lit cannabis resin joints. The authors set out to discover whether you could set petrol on fire by dropping a lit cigarette or hash joint onto it. It turns out, surprisingly, that you can’t. | Neuroskeptic | full story }

Over the years Dr Ernst and his group have run clinical trials and published over 160 meta-analyses of other studies. (Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for extracting information from lots of small trials that are not, by themselves, statistically reliable.) His findings are stark.

According to his “Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine”, around 95% of the treatments he and his colleagues examined—in fields as diverse as acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and reflexology—are statistically indistinguishable from placebo treatments.

In only 5% of cases was there either a clear benefit above and beyond a placebo (there is, for instance, evidence suggesting that St John’s Wort, a herbal remedy, can help with mild depression), or even just a hint that something interesting was happening to suggest that further research might be warranted.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

In his talk, Gregory Longmore of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, outlined some of the complex signaling pathways responsible for metastasis. Somehow, cancer cells break off from a primary tumor, break through the layer of cells that separates them from the bloodstream, and then spread to new sites.

Of the facts and figures Longmore cited, two struck me especially. Ninety percent of cancer patients are killed by metastases, not primary tumors. Ninety-nine percent of cancer cells that make their way into the bloodstream die. “Metastasis is incredibly inefficient,” he said.

{ Charles Day/Physics Today | Continue reading | More: Oncogenes }

Charles Darwin suffered from a persistent, debilitating illness for most of his adult life with a wide range of bizarre symptoms. Attacks of nausea and vomiting were his most distressing complaint but he also experienced headaches, abdominal pains, ‘lumbago’, palpitations and chest pain, numbness and tingling in the fingers, sweating, heat and cold sensitivity, flushing and swelling of his face and extremities, eczema, recurrent boils, attacks of acute anxiety, a sensation of dying and hysterical crying.

Apart from these major symptoms Darwin also occasionally vomited blood, he developed dental decay and skin pigmentation. (…) Darwin also had mild dyslexia. (…) With the dyslexia there is a frequent association of amusica – tone deafness, and Darwin was tone deaf.

{ Butterflies and wheels | Continue reading }

photo { Sanna Kannisto }

A link between late-night eating and weight gain has been debated for years. But though many dieters suspect a connection, it has not been borne out in studies.

Most of the research on the matter has been carried out in animals, and with mixed results. A 2005 study of primates at Oregon Health & Science University found that late-night meals did not lead to extra weight gain; whether consumed at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m., a calorie was just a calorie.

But a study on adult men and women, published in April in the journal Obesity, has added support to the claim that eating late does have a greater effect on the waistline. (…)

Eating at night may in fact lead to more weight gain, though it’s not clear why.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. (…)

More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.

{ Queen’s University | Continue reading }

Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning sun. (…) In the months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

images { Odette England }