Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival Hardcover – February 1, 2000
Author: Visit Amazon's T. S. Wiley Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0671038672 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival – February 1, 2000
You can download Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival – February 1, 2000 for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Books with free ebook downloads available Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival – February 1, 2000
You can download Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival – February 1, 2000 for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Books with free ebook downloads available Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival – February 1, 2000
- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: Atria (February 1, 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0671038672
- ISBN-13: 978-0671038670
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #198,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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.
Lights Out had the potential to be a great book.
I agree with the main point of the book that it's healthier NOT to stay up late with artificial lights, TV, and the internet. I also agree that the healthiest diet is a diet low in carbohydrates (and especially low in sugar) with generous quantities of animal proteins and fats. I like the advice to go to sleep after the sun sets and to seal all light out of the bedroom. It's great that someone is exploring the topic of humans sleeping out of synch with the natural night.
BUT I have to say that T.S. Wiley is one of the worst writers I've ever read, not to mention that she's a total crackpot nut case. The writing is completely disorganized, contradictory, and sensationalist with lots of black and white thinking and lots of false information.
Why couldn't she have just stuck to the very important information about sleep, light, and carbohydrates and skipped all of her nutty, self-indulgent, provincial biases?
Her tone is often unnecessarily offensive: "Think of fat as a condom for your carbs," (page 173).
She contradicts herself constantly and gives completely false information: "The Aztecs had corn oil as a fat source, the Greeks had olives, and the Chinese had the soybean," (page 178), and then: "Think about the world we're really from. There were no machines, and therefore there was no corn oil," (page 180).
Just so no one is left confused by Wiley's misinformation, the Aztecs, who existed no later than the 16th century, did NOT eat corn oil, which was invented around the turn of the 20th century. Similarly, soybeans were NOT the source of fat for the Chinese.
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