Is Electricity Making Us Sick & Fat?
Is Electricity Making us Sick & Fat?
For thousands of years, people have woken up at sunrise to do whatever they had to do. Most of their activities were done during the hours where there was sunlight. When it became dark, they didn’t have much to do so for the most part, they slept. Over the past one hundred years, people have become have heavily dependent on electricity and electricity created activities that people could during the night hours. Because of this, people began to stay up during the night longer which forces the body to go against our “natural circadian rhythms” which eventually throws off important hormones in the body such as melatonin, insulin, and cortisol. Some experts have noted that there’s evidence that people with shifts that run late into the night have higher rates of breast cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
A researcher in the school of biological sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland by the name of Cathy Wyse first suspected that there might be a possible link between health and electricity in 2005. A few years later when she found that the health and life spans of mice were affected when she altered the amount of time that the mice were exposed to darkness and light. To make sure this wasn’t just a one species incident; she repeated the study in other animals and received the same results that she did with the mice. A theory that came before Wyse’s experiment concluded that people that had moved farther north where periods of daylight and nighttime remained constant gained more weight than people that lived in latitudes with larger day-night fluctuations.
Since electricity is here to stay, the effects on your health can be limited by keeping a regular good sleep schedule. A study shows that people with different weekend and weekday sleep schedules had a greater chance of becoming or being overweight. By limiting nighttime electronic use such as the TV