29 October 2008

Standard Time: Better for your heart

This spring, for the first time, I refused to set my clocks one hour ahead. Like clockwork, I've been rising from bed at 7am (ish) Standard Time - although for most everyone else in this hemisphere that has meant 8am Daylight Saving Time.

I just don't adjust well to time changes and it takes me at least triple the time it does anyone else. Now there's support for what the 'ole bod has been telling me.

Heart attacks decrease by 5 percent the first Monday after the [Standard] Time change, and by 1.5 percent over that week, according to an analysis in this week's New England Journal of Medicine. The findings are based on 20 years of data from a Swedish registry of nine million residents.

The springtime transition to Daylight Saving time poses more of a health hazard: Heart attacks increase by 5 percent over the first week after clocks are pushed back an hour, spiking by 10 percent on that Tuesday, epidemiologists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found.


Thing is, I've seen NO change in my consumption of energy over the past seven months, as compared to other years when I did set my clocks forward. Ergo, for me at least, there has been no justification for the demand to change my clocks. And healthwise, there was every reason to leave my darn clocks alone.

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