Month: April 2018

Night owls might get a rap for staying up too late watching Netflix or getting lost in meme spirals on the web, but it’s not all fun and games. Study after study shows the later you sleep and rise, the more likely you are to develop some serious health complications.

A new paper by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Surrey in the UK doubles down on the findings that night owls are more likely to suffer from a host of different diseases and disorders—diabetes, mental illnesses, neurological problems, gastrointestinal issues, and heart disease, to name a few. It also concludes, for the first time, that night owls had a 10 percent increased risk of dying (in the time period used in the study) compared to those who are early to rise and early to sleep (a.k.a. larks).

“I think it’s really important to get this message out to people who are night owls,” says lead author Kristen Knutson, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “There may be some compelling consequences associated with these habits, and they might need to be more vigilant in maintaining a healthier lifestyle.”

Published in the latest issue of Chronobiology International, the paper analyzed 433,268 individuals who participated in the UK Biobank, a massive cohort study run from 2006 to 2010 aimed at investigating the role of genetic predisposition and environmental contributions to disease prevalence. Those participants were asked questions related to their chronotype, or preferred time and duration of sleeping during a 24-hour day. Participants identified as “definitely a morning person,” “more a morning person than evening person,” “more an evening than a morning person,” or “definitely an evening person.”

The researchers found that about 10,000 subjects died in the six-and-a-half years that followed the end of the Biobank study, and the ones who were “definite evening types” had a 10 percent increased risk of perishing compared to “definite morning types.” This number, the researchers say, was found after controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and prior health problems.

That sounds scary, sure—but there are a few limitations worth considering. For one, says Knutson, “we weren’t able to pinpoint and find out why night owls were more likely to die sooner,” so the direct cause of mortality is unknown, creating some murkiness as to what extent night owl lifestyles influenced those deaths.

“We think,” says Knutson, “it is at least partly due to our biological clocks. We think the problem is that the night owls are forced to live in a more ‘lark’ world, where you have to get up early for work and start the day than their internal clocks want to. So it’s a mismatch between the internal clock and the external world, and it’s a problem in the long run.”

The mismatch Knutson is referring to has to do with circadian rhythms, the biological processes that govern the body over the course of the 24-hour day. Circadian rhythms determine sleep patterns, energy levels, hormones, and body temperature—basically all the most important things. “There are ideal or optimal times for certain things to occur,” says Knutson. Messing with your preferred sleep schedule can drastically disrupt your circadian rhythms, which in turn can have severe, negative effects on your health. We’re all feeling the effects of this, to some extent, no matter when we like to go to sleep; research indicates that modern humans are sleeping poorly thanks to artificial light, warmer temperatures, and stress, and scientists are working to understand what kind of impact this has on our health. Studies on extreme cases—shift workers and people like ER doctors and firefighters who regularly stay up all night—suggest the downsides can be quite dire.

Unfortunately, the Biobank data only indicated whether someone identified as a morning or evening person, not whether they had a sleep schedule that suited their chronotype. “We know what they’re preferred time to sleep is, but we have no idea what they were actually doing on a day-to-day basis,” says Knutson. That’s a question she hopes to address in subsequent studies.

Moreover, the data is limited to just British participants, most of whom were caucasians of Irish or English descent. It’s likely the results would be similar for other populations in the Western world, but they could also be substantially different for night owls elsewhere.

To some extent, you’re stuck with the chronotype you’re born with. Genes play a significant role in governing your internal clock, so if you’re naturally attuned to sleeping at 3:00 a.m. and waking up at 11:00 a.m., your best bet would be to find a career and lifestyle where this is okay.

But there are certain actions individuals could take to minimize the difference between their internal clock and their external life. In a perfect world, Knutson notes, employers could be more cognizant and allow employees to pick a work schedule that offers a good compromise between everyone’s needs. People can also shift their sleep and wake hours a little earlier to minimize discord, but they would need to do so gradually, and maintain that shift consistently. Lapsing into night owl habits on the weekends or on vacation is out of the question.

Of course, being a creature of the night isn’t all bad. Other studies have shown that the whole morning versus night person debate is really more of a proxy battle between organized and meticulous, or being expressive and imaginative: day-dwellers might be more focused on achieving goals and paying attention to details, but all-nighters tend to be more creative and open to new experiences. If you’re a night owl, don’t be too rash to think you should change yourself. Maybe you just need a career that harnesses your artistic side—and lets you sleep in a little.

For the thousands of tourists who take to the Great Lakes each summer, Michigan seems like a waterlogged oasis in the middle of an otherwise crusty continent. But for all its soggy splendor (the mit-shaped midwestern state is surrounded on three sides by water), the last few years have read like an unmitigated disaster.

In 2014, officials moved the residents of Flint, Michigan off their historic water source—treated H20 from Lake Huron and the Detroit River—to improperly treated liquid pulled from the Flint River. Two years later, Michigan’s governor declared a state of emergency when it could no longer be denied that drinking and otherwise using the water piped in from Flint River had exposed thousands of children to high levels of the neurotoxin lead and may have triggered a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

Since January 2016, Flint residents have lived on bottles of water delivered by the state government by the thousands. On April 6, officials announced the water drops would stop, saying the lead levels in Flint tap water had been meeting federal limits for almost two years. The move was criticized by locals, many of whom expressed their distrust of the water—and the people in charge of it.

At the same time, another water bottling issue has been brewing in the state. Just four days earlier, on April 2, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approved a widely-protested plan that would allow the snack company Nestlé to pump 250 gallons of water a minute from White Pine Springs, which the company will then bottle, brand like Nestlé Pure Life Purified Water or Ice Mountain 100% Natural Spring Water, and sell (at least in New York) for about $2.50 a pop.

The timing, though purely coincidental, brings to the forefront an issue of increasing international importance: the privatization of water.

The history of bottled water is actually rather murky. Some say it was Holy Well bottling in the United Kingdom, which first began selling spring water in 1622, under the reign of King James I. Others trace it to Jackson’s Spa, in Boston, which began selling its allegedly medicinal water in 1767. The intervening 150 years saw hundreds of other companies get into the water game, including Nestlé, which got in the bottling game in 1843 in Switzerland. By 2016, bottled water sales hit $16 billion in the United States alone and are expected to keep rising around the world.

At the same time water bottle sales have shot up, access to clean and affordable water has declined. La Paz in Bolivia, Cape Town in South Africa, and numerous other cities are hitting the rocky bottom of their natural aquifers and glacial reserves. While there’s certainly enough water on the planet—Earth has an estimated 326 million trillion gallons of it—it’s not always in the right places or in the right form. (Most of Earth’s water is stored in its oceans, which humans cannot directly consume due to high saline content.)

Water bottling companies like Nestlé and Coca-Cola may seem like the solution to many of these problems. Their product is potable and portable. In some areas, like the northeastern United States, there has been an uptick in rainfall just as other cities have become more arid, which makes water redistribution a tantalizing thought. The same is true for communities like Flint, where waters are so contaminated locals had no choice but to bus in some liquid life from off-site.

But experts continue to urge caution. For one, the companies that bottle water often do so cheaply, which means companies are pocketing the vast majority of those billions, instead of sharing them with the cities from which they take water. In the case of Nestlé’s operations in Michigan, the company was paying just $200 in extraction fees, according to a 2017 investigation by Bloomberg. And a price tag was conspicuously absent from news reports on the additional bottling rights Nestlé secured in Michigan this month. In other states like Maine and Texas, the Bloomberg article notes, absolute capture laws allow landowners—whether they’re an average joe or a multinational corporation—to suck every ounce of groundwater beneath their property, free of charge.

In already-arid places like Texas, these loosey-goosey water rights pose clear problems. As groundwater is rapidly depleted across the United States, drought looms ever larger. But the Great Lakes state aren’t immune just because they have abundant H20. In advance of this month’s permit approval for new Nestlé pumping, 80,945 Michiganders wrote to their officials in opposition to the permit. Just 75 public comments were in favor. Among those who dissented, concerns over corporate greed were cited regularly. Many people also stated their belief that water is a right, not a commodity.

Other concerns center on the environment. Even in a place where water appears to flow aplenty, these concerns appear to be founded. Numerous studies, including those conducted by Nestlé itself, suggest aggressive pumping can and already has caused ecological damages. One attempted solution has been to cap the gallons pumped each day, there by conserving the watershed. But Nestlé has been accused of pumping beyond the permit in the past. In the midst of a recent drought, the company appears to have taken more than its legal allotment of water from California’s San Bernardino National Forest, where the company was operating with little environmental oversight. Between 1947 and 2015, the state’s water board reported, Nestlé pumped an average of 62.6 million gallons a year, but may have only had permits to extract 8.5 million gallons annually.

When juxtaposed against the crisis in Flint, the promise and peril of bottled water seems particularly stark. After public officials made disastrous decisions, bottled water was the only thing keeping residents safe and their thirst slaked. But now that the government-subsidized shipments are done, it’s questionable whether the people of Flint will be able to pay for bottled water on their own. Flint is one of the poorest cities in the nation and many residents have wracked up thousands of dollars in water bills despite being unable to safely drink the liquid sent to their homes and schools. Meanwhile, mere miles away, premium Michigan water is being pumped for profit.

Instead of offering us a sideways glance at tragedy, Flint seems to provide a glimpse into the future. As EPA programs protecting our waters from pollution are rolled back, for-profit companies gobble up pumping permits, and freshwater becomes harder to access, bottled water sales will only grow. While many will find some refuge from thirst in Nestlé Pure Life or Coca Cola’s Dasani bottles, the industry’s increasing relevance will require equal scrutiny.