Category: sleep

Association of Sleep and Chronic Illness

Seth Roberts15 Comments

A recent PatientsLikeMe survey found a strong correlation between chronic illness and poor sleep. Here are the most interesting results:

PatientsLikeMe survey respondents in the U.S. (n=3,284) . . . are almost nine times more likely to [have] insomnia than the general adult population. . . . PatientsLikeMe members with health conditions experience [each] of the four symptoms of insomnia [= trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, early awakening, and waking up not rested] at twice the rate of the general adult population.

This supports my view that bad sleep causes illness. The correlations could have plausibly been the other way (better sleep among survey respondents). People sleep more when sick. Whatever makes sick people sleep more might also make them fall asleep faster and wake up less often.

If I slept poorly, I would move heaven and earth to sleep better. (But would never take sleeping pills.) I sleep well, actually, but I still track my sleep and do various experiments to see if I can improve it. For example, recently I was puzzled why I was sleeping less well in Berkeley than in Beijing. One possibility was that my Beijing bedroom was darker than my Berkeley bedroom, even though my Berkeley bedroom was quite dark (e.g., no light from a street lamp). I made my Berkeley bedroom even darker and found my sleep improved. It really was cause and effect. When I made my Berkeley bedroom lighter, my sleep got worse.

My enormous concern with sleep — nothing matters more for health — seems to put me in a tiny minority. Even sleep researchers don’t say bad sleep causes sickness. However, Robb Wolf agrees with me. He has said, “If someone sleeps poorly it is hard to keep them alive. If someone sleeps well, it is hard to kill them” — a good way of putting it. At the recent Ancestral Health Symposium in Atlanta, I asked him where he got this. He said it was based on his experience, meaning his experience working with other people.

My view is heavily based on my experience of my own health. Exactly when I greatly improved my sleep, I greatly improved my health. I stopped getting obvious colds. The people around me continued to get them. I hadn’t expected this. In the research literature I found plenty of support for the idea that better sleep causes better health. An example is that poorer health during the winter seems to be due to less light, not the cold. I am sure morning sunlight improves sleep. Vitamin D has been associated with dozens of measures of health (more Vitamin D, better health). This too may reflect the underlying causality better sleep –> better health because sunlight increases Vitamin D and improves sleep. That morning Vitamin D improves sleep (Tara Grant’s great discovery) be important here. Epidemiologists should always measure sleep the way they always measure smoking. Now they almost never do.

Thanks to Richard Sprague.

More “Even sleep researchers don’t say that bad sleep causes illness” — that’s wrong. Here’s an example:

Yet there’s strong evidence that lost sleep is a serious matter. The Sleep in America polls and several large studies have linked sleep deficits with poor work performance, driving accidents, relationship problems, and mood problems like anger and depression. A growing list of health risks has been documented in recent studies, too. Heart disease, diabetes, and obesity have all been linked with chronic sleep loss. ”People just don’t realize how important sleep is, and what the health consequences are of not getting a good night’s sleep on a regular basis,” Hunt tells WebMD. “Sleep is just as important for overall health as diet and exercise.”

I should have said sleep researchers don’t connect good sleep with good immune function, which this quote illustrates.

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Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Shangri-La Diet Success, Including Better Sleep

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Greg Pomerantz writes:

Over the Thanksgiving [2012] holiday, I suggested to a relative, Richard, that he try the Shangri-la Diet. At the time I had heard about it but did not know anyone who had tried it. I did not have any particular reason to think it would work, but since Rich had tried a number of other diets (including low carb, which he is still following for the most part) I thought it would be worth a shot.

He started the diet over the Thanksgiving holiday and has kept it up since then with a few breaks. He lost 13 pounds in the first month and another 6 pounds over the next two weeks. Altogether he lost a total of 32 pounds over the 16 weeks following Thanksgiving, an average of 2 pounds per week. During this period, he traveled a fair amount and was not able to maintain the diet every day. However, he reported that one of his favorite things about the Shangri-la Diet is how easy it is to restart after a lapse. He began using extra light olive oil but has switched to walnut oil.

There were two surprising results other than the weight loss (which I think is exceptional in its own right). First, his blood sugar control has improved, even compared to the low carbohydrate diet he was (and still is) consuming. Second, he has been sleeping better at night due to a reduction in his nighttime appetite. I believe the two may be related — one of his medications for type 2 diabetes greatly increases his appetite and causes weight gain. He has been using much less of that medication because of his improved blood sugar on the Shangri-la Diet. Therefore, reduced appetite from the diet plus a reduction in an appetite-increasing medication results in lower nighttime appetite and therefore better sleep.

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Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Paul Nash and Adam Clemens.

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Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull , Bryan Castañeda, Patrick Vlaskovits and Tucker Max.

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Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Hal Pashler.

Want to Sleep Better? Through Personal Science?

Seth Roberts8 Comments

If someone sleeps well, it’s tough to kill them. If someone does not sleep well, it’s tough to keep them alive. Robb Wolf quoted someone to this effect at the last Ancestral Health Symposium. One reason it’s plausible is better sleep improves immune function. For example, why are colds are more common in winter? Well, flu bouts peak during the light minimum (December) rather than the temperature minimum (February). Less light makes sleep worse, so this supports the idea that colds are more common in winter due to worse sleep. Likewise, heart attacks are more common in the winter, suggesting that better sleep would reduce heart attacks. I stopped getting obvious colds when my sleep got much better. Vaccinations are much less effective if the person vaccinated is kept awake the following night.

I’ve found new ways to improve my sleep: avoid breakfast, standing a lot, morning light exposure, one-legged standing, and eating more animal fat. I’ve confirmed Tara Grant’s discovery of the value of Vitamin D3 in the morning. I’ve made these improvements via low-tech tracking, good experimental design and data analysis, and wise choice of treatment.

I want to find out if my method and findings can help others. I am looking for people who would like my (paid) help improving their own sleep. In my search for people to try brain tracking, I judged interest and motivation partly by willingness to pay and it worked well.. If you are interested, please submit an application (see below).

At least at first, I’ll only pick one or two people. I’ll do whatever I can to help the chosen applicants measure their sleep, choose wisely what to test, do useful experiments, and analyze the data. They can have as much contact with me as they want.

There are four ways you might benefit from this: (a) Sleep better. (b) Learn how to use personal science to improve your health in other ways. (c) Help everyone learn if the treatments you try have value. (I will try to publicize the results, whatever they are.) (d) Help everyone learn the value of personal science to being healthy.

If this might interest you, please email sleep.where@gmail.com with your answers to the following questions:

1. Name, age, sex, job, location.

2. Phone number (good times to call), skype id (if any).

3. What’s wrong with your sleep? For how long have you had this problem or problems?

4. How have you tried to improve your sleep? What happened?

5. How many colds do you get in a typical year? How long does a typical cold last?

6. How much would you pay for the first month (after a free consultation)?

7. How much would you pay per month after the first month?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eliminating Nocturnal Urination

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A male reader who wishes to be anonymous writes:

I am 53. When I was in my late 40s I started having to wake up to urinate in the middle of the night. Sometimes more than once. I complained to the physician. He said, “That’s BPH [= benign prostatic hyperplasia = enlarged prostate]. It’s what happens in middle age. Live with it.”

A couple years later on an airplane, I read an article about pygeum [a herbal remedy] as a cure for BPH. I started taking some. It helped, but not a lot. Reading about pygeum I stumbled across saw palmetto. I started taking a supplement that contained both of them. Now I was much improved, but there was still room for improvement.

A friend told me about magnesium supplementation. I started taking magnesium in addition, and I was cured. It’s like I’m in my 30s again. I only have to urinate in the middle of the night if I drink a lot of fluid right before bed.

Sleep is so important, this is really important. At a talk Thursday at the Ancestral Health Symposium, Robb Wolf quoted someone as saying, “If someone sleeps well, you can’t kill them; if they sleep badly, you can’t keep them alive.”

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Seth Roberts1 Comment

 

Thanks to Ken Feinstein.

More Examples of Mainstream Health Care Ignoring the Immune System

Seth Roberts19 Comments

In a recent post I made an obvious point. If our immune systems were stronger, we would need antibiotics less often and antibiotic resistance would become less of a problem. I hadn’t heard this point made (for example, this WHO report fails to say it). This was one example, I said, of how mainstream health care ignores the immune system. Perfectly obvious things, such as this idea about antibiotic resistance, fail to be noticed. I gave five more examples. Since then I have come across even more examples:

1. Hospitals do little to help patients sleep and often interrupt sleep, Nancy Lebovitz pointed out (better sleep –> better immune function). This article describes the problem. One way to improve hospital sleep — beyond don’t wake patients up — would be to provide exposure to strong sunlight-like light in the morning and prevent exposure to sunlight-like light after dark. I found that an hour of sunlight or similar light from fluorescent lamps in the morning improved my sleep. Most fluorescent light resembles sunlight (both have strong bluish components), incandescent light (reddish) does not. Until they install dual lighting systems (bluish light during the day, reddish light at night), hospitals can provide blue-blocker glasses to wear after dark.

2. The book Immortal Bird (sent me by the publisher) tells how Damon Weber, born with a defective heart, had a heart transplant when he was a teenager. After the transplant, problems arose. The doctors involved (at NewYork-Presbyterian ­Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center) took the problems to be signs of transplant rejection. In fact they were due to infection. Drugs given to deal with the mistakenly-assumed rejection suppressed Damon’s immune system. They reduced his ability to fight off the infection and he died. The author of the book, Damon’s father, sued the doctors and hospital for malpractice. The doctors did not exactly “ignore” the immune system, but they apparently failed to fully grasp the danger of immune suppression, even though the infection that killed Damon is common in transplant cases. (Although Columbia Presbyterian charged half a million dollars for the transplant, “three years into the lawsuit the [hospital’s] medical director claimed Damon’s post-op records couldn’t be located.”)

3. I asked a UCSF medical student what she’d been taught about the immune system. “We cover it!” she said. In a section called “Infectious Disease, Immunology, and Inflammation”. What makes the immune system work better or worse? I asked. “If you’re stressed out, it doesn’t work well,” she said. If you’re malnourished, like in Bangladesh. You need “nutrients and vitamins”. (A booklet I got telling me to take less antibiotics told me to “eat healthy”.) She also said the students get entire lectures on how to treat diseases so rare they might never be encountered. There is a whole section on genetics. Sure, they cover it. So superficially that they don’t remember the most basic idea: Better sleep –> better immune function. I said our health care system is built around first, let them get sick. That’s right, she said. Ignoring the immune system is an excellent way to allow people to get sick.

4. Melissa McEwen pointed out that proton pump inhibitors, such as Nexium, reduce the body’s ability to fight infection. They are prescribed for acid reflux and reduce how much acid the stomach makes. Because stomach acid kills bacteria, there should have been far more concern about their safety. “Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are among the most widely prescribed medications worldwide [billions of prescriptions]. . . . The collective body of information overwhelmingly suggests an increased risk of infectious complications,” says this article. Because the drugs are so common, the damage is great and, because of more infection, not restricted to those who take them. It could have been avoided by research into treatments that do not harm the immune system.