Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival

Go to bed. That’s the central takeaway of Lights Out, a book I’ve read three times, underlining new insights with each pass. While some claims might raise eyebrows, the core argument is simple and compelling: modern life—thanks to electricity, HVAC, endless food, and minimal movement—has left us sick and exhausted. Chronic issues like depression, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and even cancer stem from living out of sync with nature. Wiley’s solution? Follow the seasons. In summer, eat plenty, work hard, and prepare for winter. In winter, eat fewer carbs, rest more, and align with the natural darkness. But here’s the kicker: thanks to artificial light, we’re stuck in perpetual "summer," confusing our bodies and paying the price. In just 200 pages, this book will challenge how you see sleep, health, and modern living. Seriously—do yourself a favor and read it. Then go take a nap.

Suppose--just suppose--it was proven that you and virtually everyone you knew was doing something terribly dangerous to your health. Now imagine that correcting this hazard was not only simple but relaxing and already on-hand. If that was the case, you'd change your ways, right? Well, there is in fact strong evidence--I'd almost call it proof--that modern Americans are gradually killing themselves via long-term sleep deprivation, and we need to be aware of the problems we are causing ourselves, right now! Fact: the average American adult just 100 years ago spent 9.5 hours of every 24 hours asleep. The average American adult in the year 2000 slept just 6.2 hours per night. If your answer to those statistics is, "So what?" you definitely need to read this book. The cold hard fact seems to be this: human beings were (pick your choice here) A) designed by God; B) evolved in nature; C) grew used over hundreds of generations to spending perhaps as much as half their lives asleep. Certainly even by the most conservative of views, we humans need to sleep at least a third of our existence. How many of us get even eight hours a night anymore? Sadly only about one in six. It's only been in the last 5-6 generations, since the advent of electrical lighting, that humans have shifted away from the natural day/night, sleep/wake cycles by which our species was regulated. Is it coincidental that it is also in that time period we have seen this massive onset of catastrophic illnesses (especially mental illness) in record breaking numbers? No. Nor is sleep the only factor in the escalation of catastrophic illness, but it is one large piece in the puzzle. More than likely human beings simply have not had time to adjust in the course of a hundred years or so to massives changes in the sleep cycles their forebears spent perhaps ten-thousand generations acclimating themselves to. Sleep is the time of healing, of unwinding, of our body producing mood-regulating hormones such as melatonin (which can ONLY be manufactured in total darkness and only during one specific segment of the nightly sleep cycle). A lack of sufficient sleep interrupts the production of insulin, testosterone, estrogen, seratonin, can lead to diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease, cancer, senility, infertility, and a laundry list of other medically-incontrovertible health crises, including, paradoxically, sleep apnea! And yet we modern Americans continue to stay up nights, working on computers, watching television, reading, burning the proverbial midnight oil, even while our culture reels under the effects of an epidemic of disease, mental illness and seemingly perpetual malaise. It is even said that one automobile accident in seven is related to "drowsy driver syndrome" a contributing factor in as many as 3,000 highway deaths and 30,000 injuries annually! Nothing that can be written in the space of a brief review can do justice to the overpowering weight of argument, study, fact, and an

We already had a navy blue bedroom and blackout shades, but we now close doors that lead to the hall and bathroom where nightlights glow and cover up the clock and cable box LEDs. It is difficult to recondition ourselves to go to bed so early, but when were able to do it for about two weeks, we did lose weight. It was almost like those ads you see--"Lose Weight while You Sleep!"--but we really were doing just that, but without any drugs.If you are sleep-deprived, eat too many carbs, and are overweight, you should get this book and try to follow the program. You will definitely feel better and you might just lose some of those extra pounds too!

One of the most provocative medical detective stories I've ever read. Hooray for the authors, who've looked at our health problems with fresh eyes and common sense. The evidence they've compiled that messing with Mother Nature will make you sick makes perfect sense. It's one of those books that really changes the way you look at the world. And it's fun to read in the way that really interesting science/medical books can be. You'll learn a lot. I did. A fun fact: the NIH has proven that mice that sleep in the dark and are up in the light cannot be given cancer, no matter how many carcinogens they are subjected to.

If anything, Lights Out is done a disservice by it's own publicity. From the cover and the following reviews, I thought it was yet another wanna-be fad diet, only this one was reffered to as "the drool on your pillow diet." Ouch. I'm not one for diet books or self help. I only read it in the first place because I couldn't get my mother to stop reading it out-loud. Actually, to my grate surprise, Lights Out is a thoughtful, and provacative treatment of evolutionary biology. It explains how we work on a molecular level, and explains why we're the way we are from cave men on down. It explains things as as pragmatic as why you should go to bed, and why dieting always makes people fat and crabby. As well as overwhelming things, such as why the so-called diseases of civilization have singled us out, why we're speeding our own end as a species THROUGH medical advances, and basicly why evolution sucks. At first the theories seem no less than brillient, but once read, take on an erie quality of common sense, leaving the reader wondering why no one else knows any of this. That's when the book gets scary- apparently everyone knows (the FDA, the Surgon General, everybody) and the rest of us haven't been told for some seriously sick reasons. It reads like a mystery novel, so I don't wanna give too much away. But the bottom line is my mother can't be everywhere, reading out-loud at everyone, so it's up to you to go check it out for yourselves. It's well worth the trip.

Wiley and Formby rely on scientific and evolutionary truths to formulate their theory that the dawn of artificial lighting and the resulting 24/7 culture have played havoc with our health. Sleep deprivation is only part of the theory: Not sleeping when we're supposed to (ie. when the sun goes down until it comes back up again) interferes with hormone levels. Those irregular hormone levels create food cravings -- for the wrong kinds of foods, which leads to obesity -- along with depression, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer. Although the cover insinuates that this is primarily a diet book, it is so much more. It's an entertaining roadmap that shows us how we can eradicate the diseases that plague modern man and woman by paying attention to the natural cycles of our body and of the planet. If that sounds too New Age-y for ya, consider that there are 97 pages of endnotes and scientific references. But all that science doesn't mean it's a ho-hum read: The writing style is quick and clever, and references to evolutionary truths, quantum physics and molecular biology are completely comprehensible, thanks to the authors' personal and personable style. I've not read this theory anywhere else; other researchers have alluded to sleep deprivation, but none I know has actually been able to prove like Wiley and Formby that it is the reason we are all dying of the same diseases.