Product Description

When it comes to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression, everything you believe is a lie.

Lights Out

With research gleaned from the National Institutes of Health, T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby deliver staggering findings: Americans really are sick from being tired. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression are rising in our population. We're literally dying for a good night's sleep.

Our lifestyle wasn't always this way. It began with the invention of the lightbulb.

When we don't get enough sleep in sync with seasonal light exposure, we fundamentally alter a balance of nature that has been programmed into our physiology since Day One. This delicate biological rhythm rules the hormones and neurotransmitters that determine appetite, fertility, and mental and physical health. When we rely on artificial light to extend our day until 11 PM, midnight, and beyond, we fool our bodies into living in a perpetual state of summer. Anticipating the scarce food supply and forced inactivity of winter, our bodies begin storing fat and slowing metabolism to sustain us through the months of hibernation and hunger that never arrive.

Our own survival instinct, honed over millennia, is now killing us.

Wiley and Formby also reveal:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #650310 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Library Journal
This fascinating, thought-provoking study discusses the central role of sleep in our lives. After probing the scientific literature, Wiley and Formby, researchers at the Sansum Medical Research Institute, conclude that "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." Our internal clocks are governed by seasonal variations in light and dark; extending daylight artificially leads to a craving for sugar, especially concentrated, refined carbohydrates that, in turn, cause obesity. More seriously, lack of sleep inhibits the production of prolactin and melatonin--deranging our immune systems and causing depression, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The authors prescribe sleeping at least nine and a half hours in total darkness in the fall and winter and switching to a diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein, vegetables, and healthy fats. They support their arguments with 100 pages of notes and by tracing the progression of disease from hunter-gatherers to our high-tech society. Despite its somewhat strident, all-knowing tone, this illuminating work is highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
---Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The lightbulb put us out of sync with nature. Way back when, people spent the summer sleeping less and eating heavily in preparation for winter because light triggers the hunger for carbohydrates. Now, with light available 24 hours a day, we gulp down food all year long. So, Wiley and Formby assert, it is light, not what we eat or whether we exercise, that causes obesity--and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Indeed, eating bacon, ham, butter, and eggs for breakfast doesn't impair health, and exercise can make you fat. If we considered our waking periods as equivalent to the long days of summer and the short ones of winter, we would avoid those health problems. Wiley and Formby offer three steps for improvement, but they aren't optimistic, because the light-driven speed and intensity of contemporary life may be too much to overcome. Still, try, first, plugging the leaks in your psyche; then, because you will have lost weight, resisting carbohydrates; and, finally, swallowing a few pills and helpful foods. William Beatty

About the Author
T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby, Ph.D., are researchers who worked together at the Sansum Medical Research Institute at Santa Barbara, California, the site of cutting-edge diabetes research since insulin was first synthesized there in the 1920s. T.S. Wiley is an anthropologist and medical theorist with a background in investigative journalism, currently working in medical research with a special interest in endocrinology/evolutionary biology. Bent Formby holds doctorates in biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Their research has been presented at national and international medical conferences, and in scientific journals.

Customer Reviews

I Thought it Was a Diet Book
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.

Important Information, yet terribly written
I have to agree exactly with Leslie of Texas' review below.

The basic information and premise of the book - that staying up late decreases production of melatonin in our bodies, and messes up our hormone system's balance in other ways as well - is potentially crucial to our health. That is why I give this book 4 stars, despite the terrible writing.

The author has a writing style that I believe comes from not really understanding much of what she is writing - I was particularly struck by the sentence in the Acknowledgements thanking her daughter for spending "countless hours explaining physics, chemistry and math to her old mom". This was a surprising admission, considering that a good portion of the book attempts to lecture the reader about a variety of unrelated topics that are not really understood by the author (or any other pop science writers) - including chaos theory and many other recent areas of scientific thought, taken wildly out of context.

The important information to get out of the book, is that 10 years of research at the National Institute of Health have confirmed that modern man's tendency to go to sleep much later than sunset disrupts the body's natural cycles, and this causes a variety of health problems due to the effects on the critical hormone system of the human body. Levels of melatonin, prolaction, leptin, cortisol, insulin, dopamine and serotonin are all affected.

The essential recommendation of the book is - during fall and winter - to try and get at least 9.5 hours of sleep by going to sleep as soon as possible after sunset (ie by 9 or 10 pm), and the rest of the year to also try and get to sleep as soon as possible after sunset.

The other recommendations are the same as can be found in the books by Drs. Eades, ie follow a low-carbohydrate diet and do weight lifting exercise instead of aerobics.

I agree that it is unfortunate that this important research is presented in such a poorly written fashion, and mixed up with so much extraneous opinion.

Lights Out: Have We Been Kept in the Dark?
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.