LowCarbCompatible.com™

I've always had this nagging suspicion that daylight savings time might be responsible for a variety of deleterious health effects -- including things like increases in traffic accidents and other operator-related incidents -- so it came as no surprise when I read the following news blurb:

When researchers in Sweden examined the impact of daylight saving time on heart attack rates in that country, they discovered that people had slightly fewer heart attacks on the Monday after they set their clocks back in the fall and slightly more heart attacks in the days after they set their clocks ahead in the spring.

They presented their findings in a letter published in the Oct. 30 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

[snip]

"We know that Monday is the most dangerous day for heart attacks," he tells WebMD. "It has been thought that this is due to the stress associated with returning to work after the weekend, but our study suggests that disturbed sleep rhythms may be involved, and that the extra hour of sleep we get in the fall [after daylight saving time ends] may be protective."
(Emphasis mine)
Link

So, it's not a huge stretch to wonder if there are even more negative effects associated with suddenly changing everybody's clocks forward or back by an hour.

On thing that always bothered me, here in the U.S.: when I was younger (up until a few years ago, actually), we'd set our clocks back an hour on the Sunday before Halloween -- it seemed silly to change everyone's sleep cycle, making it dark an hour earlier, forcing adults to rush home during what one week earlier was late afternoon or dusk (but is now solidly dark) while millions of kids are eager to get outside and start their annual candy mooch-fest. That seemed like a recipe for disaster.

I wonder if there are any statistics comparing Halloween injury and fatality statistics before and after the time shift was moved past Halloween.

And (bringing this back to diet and weight), does the sudden time shift alter our eating habits? It's not a radical suggestion; we know that seasonal changes trigger changes to our eating and sleeping habits, causing people to put on weight during the winter months. If the time shift does trigger stress-related dietary problems, wouldn't this enter into the equation?

Personally, I'd prefer to abolish the entire daylight savings time scheme. Regardless of economic arguments, I think it's simply wrong to engage in this kind of social engineering. To think that we are supposed to wake up one day and change our collective schedules, advancing or retarding by an hour, just because someone says it must be so. Strange behavior!

I think I'll move to Arizona or Hawaii!