PhotoperiodEffect.com

10. You're telling me if I just turn out the lights more I'll lose weight magically! Time to call the guys with the white coats!

Well just before you dial that number; see answer 12 below first and try at least the first, easiest suggestions about how to dramatically reduce the sharp hormonal disruptions caused by extra light at night. They aren't much trouble, and they might very well change your mind. Within a month or two, perhaps more, you might be very pleasantly surprised by not just what happens to your weight or fasting glucose level, but other vital signs such as blood pressure and standing heart rate, as well as how much energy you have during the day, and your general mood.

More to the point, bodies are extremely complex. We don't know in advance, even when we think we do, or what will affect what. This extraordinary complexity is the reason why the process of medical discovery, even more than in other sciences, has been and continues be a series of shocking surprises throughout its history. No doubt, we aren't close to finished being flaggergasted yet. To cite just one modern example, it's taken a long time to learn, and has been a shock to find out that merely living in weightlessness rapidly disables the human immune system more thoroughly than every other medical condition except late-stage AIDS. Yet there's now no doubt about this; in fact recently we have even been able to trace much of the exact mechanism of gene expression that goes wrong without gravity. Who would have guessed that this would be the worst effect of taking away gravity? There's no a priori reason to expect weightlessness to cripple the human immune system, and there's certainly no useful reason for this to be the case. But then, if a priori reasoning worked all that well, we wouldn't need science to begin with.

While we're here, it's worth noting the parallel between removing gravity, and removing a great deal of darkness each and every day. In each case, a situation is created that evolution didn't ever prepare us for. (Or creation if you lean that way, and perhaps think God wants us to get to heaven by other means.) In such situations, it's impossible to predict what will happen accurately: neither how many consequences there will be, how harmful they will be, how long they might take to show up, nor how far removed from our expectations. Without nearly perfect knowledge, which we are still far away from, only the experiment itself can tell us. Needless to say in the case of diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other modern chronic illnesses this has been extraordinarily tragic uncontrolled experiment, no matter what the cause is, or causes are.

Finally, not only is it not bizarre to suppose that extra light might affect our metabolic system (controlling available energy and weight), but at this late hour we now know enough details about our hormone and antioxidant system that we have already discovered at least one mechanism – namely the fact that mitochondria are cleansed of free radicals by melatonin, and the knowledge that extra light at night substantially reduces melatonin – which must affect our metabolism adversely. It's now only possible to ask how much damage is being done in this way, and whether this is the only mechanism by which a prolonged photoperiod hampers, or perhaps we should even say hamstrings, our metabolic system. (It may well not be the only cause, but it's a decent bet for the main way in which diabetes is caused over time.)

If, thanks to mitochondrial inefficiency, sugars can no longer be burned in the same quantities as before, is it really so surprising that they end up being stored instead, or even spill into a diabetics urine eventually? I don't want to suggest here that it's already certain that “insulin resistance” is secondary to free radical damage to mitochondria, but it's far from a bad bet.

Melatonin, and all the hormones it controls are so important to so many vital functions in the human body that almost no eventual consequence to the body is out of the question if melatonin production is disrupted. But we already know that artificial lights do this, every day, to nearly everyone in the industrialized world, and increasingly, to everyone in the industrializing world.