Lack of Sleep Can Double Your Risk of a Heart Attack
Dr. Mercola, reports (www.mercola.com) on April 9, 2012:
Research indicates that sleeping less than six hours may increase insulin resistance and diabetes. It may also double risk of angina, coronary heart disease, heart attack or stroke. The same appears to be true when you sleep more than nine hours per night.
Humans are biologically programmed to nap during the daytime. Training your body to resist the urge to nap in the afternoon can lead to inability to easily fall asleep at night.
Ideally, you should sleep enough hours so that your energy is sustained through the day without artificial stimulation, with the exception of a daytime nap.
Engaging in shift work dramatically increases mortality. Preliminary data shows that increasing melatonin levels during your night shift—effectively turning it into a health risk.
Do You Get Enough Sleep?
Dr. Wilson responds:
I certainly agree that adequate sleep is necessary for good health. It is also clear that people with certain health problems don’t sleep very well because of their illness. This is certainly true for the most common illness in modern societies—Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome.
This food-induced brain disorder is triggered by two common dietary components—fructose and high glycemic carbohydrates. As my friend Richard Johnson has shown, if you consume more than 25 grams of fructose a day, your liver fills up with fat leading to insulin resistance. In the past we consumed small amounts of fructose mainly from fruits, vegetables and honey. Today most of our fructose comes from sugar and HFCS.
When you have insulin resistance and consume high glycemic carbohydrates, your brain is exposed to magnified glucose spikes. Over time these magnified glucose spikes trigger CARB syndrome, a disease characterized by up to 21 brain dysfunction symptoms caused by low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin.
Because melatonin comes from serotonin, people with CARB syndrome don’t sleep very well. In this case the lack of sleep is caused by the disease rather than the other way around.
Because the brain plays a key role in auto-regulating fat stores, people with CARB syndrome begin to store extra fat at any caloric intake. A brain that doesn’t work so well and excessive body fat—our waiting rooms are filled with people that fit this description.