January 2005 | Whole Health
Great Fit
Give Your Hectic Life a Breather
by Bob Condor
January is a strategic month for health clubs and fitness companies. They plan all year to cash in on holiday overindulgences and the New Year’s resolutions that follow.
Problem: Most “fitness-now” plans don’t work. In fact, health clubs rely on January signups for revenue but expect a healthy percentage (at least for the club’s bottom line) to rarely, if ever, use the facility in 2005. Stop the cycle this January. Increase your fitness quotient by embracing the most overlooked and underappreciated facet of staying healthy. Vow to get good rest in 2005.
In more than 20 years of reporting on wellness for major newspapers and magazines, few research studies have been more striking to me than a small but powerful one conducted by Eve Van Cauter and colleagues at the University of Chicago Medical Center in 1999. The experiment systematically deprived 11 healthy young men of proper sleep over 16 days.
Van Cauter designed the study to reflect real life or the cycle of how our sleep patterns get squeezed, then we attempt to make up for the shortfall (usually on weekends). The volunteers were allowed to sleep a full eight hours (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) the first three nights, then logged only four hours during each of the next six nights (1 a.m. to 5 a.m.). During the final seven nights, the young men were in bed for 12 hours (9 p.m. to 9 a.m.). The volunteers ate identical diets during the study.
Other studies had considered the effect of sleep deprivation on brain power, but this was the first study to monitor such body processes as hormone secretion, blood-sugar levels and how we metabolize carbohydrates. The findings surprised even Van Cauter. The volunteers’ vital signs looked more like those of men in their 70s rather than 20s — some subjects even showed early indicators of diabetes after the first week. The men’s evening cortisol (the hormone related to stress) levels were sky-high for males their age, matching older men who have memory impairment problems. “We found that significant sleep debt, even in young healthy men, mimics the hallmarks of advanced aging,” says Van Cauter. “We suspect that chronic sleep loss may not only hasten the onset but could increase the severity of age-related ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and memory loss.”
Sleep debt is American tradition or so it seems. In 1910, the typical American got nine hours of sleep. By 1975, the slumber number had decreased to seven-and-a-half hours and research-ers contend today’s number is no higher than seven. There are millions of adults who routinely get five hours or less each night. In contrast, the men in the study quickly rebounded from their “aging” states during the week of 12-hour sleep nights.
Sleeping a third of your day is virtually a luxury in today’s time-toppling world. But we all know how much better we think when rested. This study — and others that have recently linked lack of sleep to heart disease, Alzheimer’s and related conditions — indicates the body responds better, too.
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