Health Experts Want to Stop Daylight-Saving Time
wsj.com
wsj.com
The second topic, the main one that circadian scientists talk about, is chronic risks, and I believe they are more important to our health. To follow this logic, you have to believe that people will continue doing whatever it is they do today (e.g., going to bed at midnight), and won't shift their schedule around right away to optimize sleep--i.e. they will not recognize that their body clock is set mainly by sunlight. The campaign to change school start times has been going for 25+ years already, so fast changes here are pretty rare.
When the clocks change, people wake up at a different circadian time, and if that time is too early, it is associated with worse health outcomes.
Some large-scale epidemiological tools have been used to figure these things out. One compares the difference between sleep patterns on "work" days and "free" days - like how much do you sleep in on a weekend? (Till Roenneberg's "social jetlag"). A second method uses "position in timezone" - comparing people living on the eastern or western edge of a timezone in various ways.
Roenneberg's work from the mid-2000s showed that night owls suffer a lot under "wake up before the sun" kinds of schedules (their "social jetlag" is bigger) - it makes them fatter, more irritable, get more diabetes, etc. They don't go to bed any earlier, but they're forced to wake up earlier.
Next, when you look at timezone position (this has been done for millions of people), people on the western edge of a timezone (where the sun comes up later but the clock is set at the same time) are quite a bit worse off for cancer rates and obesity - 10-20% more for some kinds of cancers, and a roughly 20% increase in chances of being obese.
I'm worried about these chronic health problems, so I've been writing and advocating for standard time: https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b50...
Most of these curves are U-shaped...
I think generally standard time-1 would "hurt" early birds, and DST/double DST would discriminate against night owls.
The pattern for early birds is they get an invite for a business dinner at 9PM (staying up late) and then they wake up at 4:30AM anyway, so they don't sleep enough when you make them stay up late.
* the current quadrant (early morning, morning, afternoon, evening)
* the progress through the quadrant as a two digit hexadecimal number
I later stumbled across XKCD 2050, "6/6 Time".
That's nearly 1/3 of the globe. So why not ~450 down-to-the-minute timezones? Or, why not subdivide those into 28,000 down-to-the second timezones?
How would we ever ensure that all those times were universally coordinated?
Bonus question: What timezone is the moon?
>Utc is horrible for anyone who travels or deals with people outside the timezone
What no. Those are the situations where variable timezones are the most annoying because that's when you have to do the most timezone converting. Frequent ambiguity as to which 9pm, having to do math to resolve it in to a time that makes sense relative to you, and that's if it's expressed in a way that lets you do so ie "UTC+2" but more often than not they say "Eastern European Time" like that clears it up for anyone who isn't their next door neighbour. You shouldn't have to turn to google to work out what time someone is trying to say.
Maybe we could even eliminate hours and minutes and just use percents and thousandths of a percent of a day (14.4 minutes and 864 ms respectively), to avoid factors of 60 or 24 or 3600 or 1440.
Summer is worse for me than winter because I have a tougher time getting a good nights sleep due to the sun rising so early.
What I've discovered about myself is that I could never live in Alaska because I'd probably be an insomniac in the summer.
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
* https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci...
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/askscien...
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
You will always have a ton of ambivalent health experts on the matter because for most health experts this isn't their field.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-savi...
Nope. Lets change time twice a year cause health problems, IT problems, car accidents.
Its already time to use a global time and stop with this bs of timezones. Timezones are an unreliable way to measure time the relation between time space.
Does that help it make sense?
And yet, this is what DST gets so damn wrong.
Time zones exist because the Earth is roughly spherical. Going to global time does not change this, and so does not remove the need for time zones.
Once we throw our time zones the concept of a day no longer seems very useful — each season works out to about 2 kilohours or 8 megaseconds.
People are still going to want uniform event times within an area--almost no one wants businesses to open 50 seconds later in Seattle than in Redmond, for example.
We will still end up with strips separated by longitude boundaries, with events synchronized within each strip. We'll probably still synchronize each strip so that events are one hour or one half hour later than the strip to their east.
To answer questions like "is it too late to call my friend in <X> now?" where X is someplace outside your strip, you need the offset of your strip from UTC and the offset of your friend's strip. From the difference of those, and the UTC time of normal bed time in your strip, you can figure out if it is probably past bedtime in your friend's strip.
These "strips" are pretty much the same as our current "time zones".
>[T]here is a discrepancy between your biological clock and social clock, which researchers refer to as “social jet lag,” Dr. Roenneberg said. Permanent standard time is closer to the sun’s natural time so social jet lag is reduced, he added. “Daylight-saving time means that we virtually live in another time zone without changing the day-light cycle,” Dr. Roenneberg said. “The problem is the misalignment."
Which makes sense on its own, but it doesn't account for the variance within time zones. A Chicago resident experiences sunrise and sunset about an hour earlier than a resident of Lubbock, Texas, even though they are in the same time zone (Central). So you can't really say that Standard Time is the one-size-fits-all solution -- and indeed, the Illinois Senate just passed a bill [1] to make DST permanent in that state (although it is hamstrung by the same federal regulations that other states face after passing similar bills).
[1] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-senate-passes-bill-t...
Depending on schedule, location, and plain personal preference, any number of time schemes could be "the best" for any given person. Ultimately it doesn't matter whose on what time as long as we are standardized to reasonable large areas, and pick something that's within a few hours of most people's ideal.
Also Roenneberg is quite clearly aware of the variance of daylight within time zones and the health effect that this causes. I bet he's even written papers on this effect!
> Conclusion
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
[…]
> Summary
> Discrepancies and misalignments between social (local) clock time, sun clock time, and body clock time can be caused by political decisions: DST is one example. There are multiple health and safety consequences of these misalignments. Our goal is that this article’s facts and reasoning will be used to make clock choices that improve human lives.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
Personally, I prefer DST. During standard time in California, I have to shift my sleep cycle earlier relative to the clock time as I am unable to sleep once the sun is up which is typically before 7 am.
The point is that the [bi-]annual shifting causes health issues, not which side of the shift we stick to
The quirk, due to the Uniform Time Act, is that States have a choice -- either never use DST or only use DST during Spring/Summer dates stipulated by Congress.
But people do travel in an ever increasing amount over timezones. Often many of them, often more than twice a year. At least here bar opening hours have been significantly deregulated over the last decades. So you can go out and drink until 4am or 5am and obviously people do that.
Compared to that the health effects of 1 hour time shift twice a year sound ridiculous to me.
Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.
95% of the population is in the south east.
In summer, the sun is up at 4:30 AM, which means the birds go off nuts at 4 AM. Sunset is at 6:30 PM.
On a side note, listen to this little as@#$%^%^*, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk and imagine him screaming out your windows at 4 AM.
Growing up in Europe, I remember the winters to be dark and miserable, but in the summer we had sun till 9:30 PM.
There are many true and false arguments PRO and AGAINST DST.
The worst I've heard is "it will upset the cows with feed times" and "it will fade more curtains".
The best argument I've heard against DST is that it would put the kids coming home from school outside a sun-hour earlier, meaning there is more UV and it is warmer. That's a valid case against, seeing it's so bloody hot here in summer.
Another case, PRO DST study concluded that the lack of DST causes people to drive home in peak hour with the sun in their eyes, causing more accidents.
At this point, I think DST is still a good thing. It's good for the economy. We don't go out to have dinner in the dark, for example. But I'm getting too old to care.
This article's arguments are very thin in my books.
There are better arguments than that which have passed peer review:
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
See discussion on the article "So you want to abolish time zones":
Speak for yourself. I live in the south east and don't want DST.
> 95% of the population is in the south east.
That's not accurate - where did you get that figure? Regardless, Western Australia has an even greater percentage of its population in the southern part of the state than Queensland, and it voted against DST four times over the last 40 years.
> it's so bloody hot here in summer.
Not to mention by the time you go to bed the temperature is cooler without DST.
re-95% I should have said 'coastal'.
If you want to go to permanent DST, that’s gonna have to be a hard no from me, dawg. I’d rather suffer continued switching of hours than move to permanent DST.