Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival

T. S. Wiley

Jan 2002 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

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

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 p.m., 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:
-That studies from our own government research prove the role of sleeplessness in diabetes, heart disease, cancer, infertility, mental illness, and premature aging
-Why the carbohydrate-rich diets recommended by many health professionals are not only ridiculously ineffective but deadly
-Why the lifesaving information that can turn things around is one of the best-kept secrets of our day.

Lights Out is one wake-up call none of us can afford to miss.

Ratings and reviews

Despite its apocalyptic tone and feminist angles, Lights Out is a great treatment on sleep, nutrition, and health. It is pretty heavy-handed but this is mediated by sound science and research. Indeed, the science is pretty thick and would appeal to only those who are interested in such things. In fact, the layperson who was interested the health benefits could gather everything they needed from the first and last chapters. However, once the reader does sort through the science, the underlying message is clear: sleep more and you will lose weight, avoid depression, and live longer and cancer free.

This book reads like a continuous rant. Though there are many interesting facts presented, I am having trouble finishing this book due to the rant-style of writing, as well as its conspiracy theory allusions. I have only made it through the beginning 20 pages, thus maybe there is more to the book. Nonetheless, I am not sure I can finish it. I am also confused about the paragraphs on exercise. As I am reading this, it sounds like the author describes exercise as a bad thing. Still, there are many good ideas on the importance of sleep. I wish the book would focus on these, and less on ranting about the government.

Excellent, Just reconsider.

About the author

T.S. Wiley has been a writer and researcher in endocrinology, molecular biology, biophysics, and genomics for more than two decades. She is a noted speaker and educator who has testified on women’s health at the US Senate as well as presented her published research at Harvard Medical School. Her independent research has been published in the Annals of Clinical and Laboratory Science, Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, and Experimental Cell Research, among others, and her second book, Sex, Lies and Menopause (Harper Collins, 2003), is influential in the anti-aging community. As a pharmaceutical designer of drugs, she holds a patent on the Wiley Protocol and is CEO of Wiley Systems. She is a blogger for the Huffington Post, who divides her time between Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and New York City. She is mother to five children and grandmother to five grandchildren.