How long have we owned the night? Approximately four hundred years ago, the duration of light in only one place substantially changed. Paris, became the first city on the planet to hang tallow candles across the streets at night. Our word "curfew", is really two French words, couvre feu, meaning, "cover fire", lights out, go back home. Until the French idea caught on, the average citizen in all big cities hired a chaperone with a torch to accompany him after dark. Paris, retained her title as the City of Light for almost two hundred years, until gaslights were installed in some other cities in the mid 1800s.
Ok, let's move on from Paris to sleeping. Now, what happens when we don't get enough sleep? Not just fatigue, but Obesity, Diabetes Type II, depression, heart disease. infertility and cancer are on the horizon, if you don't fall asleep at the wheel first. Mental and computational insufficiency are garden-variety symptoms of fatigue. But, everyone knows the signs are really physical. When you get really tired, you ache all over, your eyes burn, and some people actually get a stomachache. These flu-like symptoms would support the bacterial endotoxin LPS buildup theory. As the endotoxins from the bacteria living in your middle build up from no sleep, you actually get sick from it. But, that's just what we cognitively feel as symptomatic cues. Feeling lousy when you lose sleep is a symptom of much bigger, life threatening things that are unraveling inside of you.
On the big screen, molecules called chemophores are present in all animals, plants and bacteria. Think of them as tranducers of energy. When hit by light, chemophore cells capture the energy and pass it along. The photons of light enact chemical and electrical changes to the nuclei of all cells. This electrification by radiant energy takes place everywhere inside you. Each of your cells is a clock that times exactly one revolution around the sun. All the molecular machinery that you need to keep the beat of the cosmos resides in each individual cell. Every cell in your body is a clock.
Bear in mind, you have a gene expressed in every cell of you call dCLOCK, and another one called dBMAL1. The proteins that these two genes code for build up in the cell and join together. The proteins from dCLOCK and dBMAL1, as they join, bind to and throw the switches on two more 'clock genes' called per and tim. Per and tim, once bound and activated, begin to produce proteins of their own that in a very general way accumulate inside the cell, just floating in the crotoplasm, around the nucleus, where they join as the hours of the day wear on. That's the 'tick'.
Now, it's the 'tock' that rocks. The tock happens when the proteins of per and time reach a critical mass floating in the crytoplasm and reenter the nucleus, where they block the function of good old dCLOCK and dBMAL1. And, the clock stops to reset. This negative feedback loop, by stopping dCLOCK and dBMAL1, self limits per and tim's protein production. In a mechanical clock, the swing of the pendulum to one side and then the other involves an ever so brief halt before it returns to the other side. In the cell, this 'hiccup' only lasts as long as it takes for the proteins of per and tim to dissipate in the nucleus. Then, it starts all over again.
Of course, in yor cells, it takes exactly one day, or one turn around the sun, for a complete feedback loop. This cellular metronome was evident when scientists found photoreceptive cells on the legs of flies called drosophila. To test the same location in humans, researchers at Cornell University put a fiber optic cable behind the knee of a study subject. They illuminated a patch of skin no bigger then a size of a quarter. The subject was in complete darkness, yet this small amount of light affected the subject's temperature and melatonin secretion. Imagine what sunbathing, all night TV or computer usage, or even air travel in and out of brightly lit airports at all hours, and staring at computer screens do to confuse your life support systems.
Since you are no more than clocks upon clocks upon clocks, if the duration of lights changes it's only matter of time before ancient switches on millions of genes controlling your physical and mental states are turn on. All of you, every cell in your body, ticktocks. So, just turning off the lights at 11.30pm, and closing your eyes to the street lights shining in your windows, the green glow of your VCR or DVD player, or ironically, your alarm clock isn't fooling even one of your cells.
This unending artificial lights constantly glaring around you all hours of the day and half of the night, which registers as the long days of summer prior to winter on your internal sundial, is the reason it's so hard to stay thin or sane. As a mammal, you are hardwired to eat sugar, make babies, store fat, and then sleep it off, and then do it again and again.
One of the primary reason, the diseases that we know to correlate with obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, etc, are all related with hibernation instinct, brought on by too much artifical light. In the hormonal state brought on by long hours of light, the urge to consume carbohydrates or drink alcohol to put on fat base for upcoming winter become metabolically and psychologically impossible to resist. In order to control our appetite for carbohydrates to lose weight, bring down insulin levels and stay sane and fertile, we MUST sleep more and tune back our circadian rhythm. That is why almost all of us are eating ourselves to death and killind each other! Dead tired.
Question. How does end stage insulin resistance stop weight gain and keep you from freezing? Well, we know that when it was too cold or too dark to sustain the plants and animals that we feed on, the unpredictability of the food supply left evolution only one solution, obesity.
Obesity was the key to survival, the key adaptation for all mammals. In order to put on enough fat for the winter, you had to become insulin resistant. The insulin receptors that allow glucose or blood sugar into your mucle cells after your liver is full to have to close shop so all of the sugar you eat can be sent to fat cells for storage. Insulin's immediate purpose is this dispersal. Insulin evolutionary purpose is insulation.
The point of being really fat is to keep you from starving and freezing. Insulin stores excess energy as internal fat around your vital organs first, before you ever see it ripple under your skin. The purpose is to insulate your heart, lungs, and digestive system from the cold, just as the fetus in a pregnant woman is protected with a layer of fat energy.
If you are diabetic, you wouldn't freeze to death death because of the natural antifreeze effect of glucose. A higher then normal concentration of blood sugar would keep the interior of your cells from freezing because of the effect carbohydrates have on water molecules. All antifreeze, even what you use in your car, tastes sweet. No? Do your own research and experiment, let me know.
Folks, check this out. Off the Antartica, fish play at the feet of the glaciers pouring into the sea. if you could take temperature of their blood, you would find it to be below freezing, yet unfrozen. On the other end of the globe, at the water's edge of icy pond in Canada, wood frogs sit absolutely still, with not even a sign of smoky breath in the frozen air. They are frozen stiff. If you picked one up of these frogs and hurled it against a tree, would it shatter? Believe it not, as soon as the ice on the pond melts, so will these frogs. The blood in their veins will warm up as soon as their hearts start beating again and within a day, their blood will run hot enough to mate.
The Antartic fishes and the frogs, along with cold-resistant insects and people, all share the protection of blood-borne antifreeze in the form of glucose. In the fish, it has another name, called glycoprotein, but it functions the same in all of us. As blood starts to freeze, the formation of ice crystals actually dehydrates the red blood cells by sucking all of the water out of them.
Once frozen, the ice crystals are as sharp as microscopic glass. These sharp crystals are formed when V shaped molecules of water lock together at hydrogen bonding sites to form a snowflake like latticework. The sharp points on the daggers of the ice slice through the cell membrane walls, and the animal dies. This end would allow hypothermia and exposure, not hibernation. Hibernation is very different from hypothermia. In hypothermia, an unprepared animal not in a diabetic state just freezes.
In the hibernation scenario, the glucose from end-stage insulin resistance protects cells by lowering the freezing temperature of blood, just as it does the water in the car by coating the water molecules with sugar to keep them from sticking together to form jagged crystals.
So, the wood frogs only looked hard as a brick, but in reality, only the water between their cells has frozen. The frogs, like any other living thing with a sugar based antifreeze blood system, freeze in slow motion. The colder their extremities get, the more sugar their livers pour into their bloodstreams to circulate as antifreeze.
When the frogs begin to thaw, the organs that were the last to freeze are the most 'coated' with sugar and therefore the first to thaw. The heart actually begins to beat in order to pump warmed blood to thaw the extremities. That way, no part of the frog is ever deprived of oxygen. They literally thawed from inside out. Isn't that cool? Stay tuned for the last couple of posts for this topic.
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