There's a lot of talk about acute risks--what happens a day or two after the time change. Most articles you'll read are all about this.<p>The second topic, the main one that circadian scientists talk about, is chronic risks, and I believe they are more important to our health. To follow this logic, you have to believe that people will continue doing whatever it is they do today (e.g., going to bed at midnight), and won't shift their schedule around right away to optimize sleep--i.e. they will not recognize that their body clock is set mainly by sunlight. The campaign to change school start times has been going for 25+ years already, so fast changes here are pretty rare.<p>When the clocks change, people wake up at a different <i>circadian</i> time, and if that time is too early, it is associated with worse health outcomes.<p>Some large-scale epidemiological tools have been used to figure these things out. One compares the difference between sleep patterns on "work" days and "free" days - like how much do you sleep in on a weekend? (Till Roenneberg's "social jetlag"). A second method uses "position in timezone" - comparing people living on the eastern or western edge of a timezone in various ways.<p>Roenneberg's work from the mid-2000s showed that night owls suffer a lot under "wake up before the sun" kinds of schedules (their "social jetlag" is bigger) - it makes them fatter, more irritable, get more diabetes, etc. They don't go to bed any earlier, but they're forced to wake up earlier.<p>Next, when you look at timezone position (this has been done for millions of people), people on the western edge of a timezone (where the sun comes up later but the clock is set at the same time) are quite a bit worse off for cancer rates and obesity - 10-20% more for some kinds of cancers, and a roughly 20% increase in chances of being obese.<p>I'm worried about these chronic health problems, so I've been writing and advocating for standard time:
<a href="https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500923" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b50...</a>
Good reasons, for sure. And engineers want to stop changing clocks twice a year for other good reasons. And many laypeople want to stop changing clocks twice a year because it's bothersome and tiresome. I don't particularly care <i>which</i> time zone is ultimately selected for my state; I just want it to be fixed year-round.
The title here implies that there's a consensus among "health experts", but there is no such thing. Click bait. All we have is some health experts saying there are downsides to the back and forth switch
Brazil ended daylight-saving time recently:<p><a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-saving-so-should-everyone_2889754.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-savi...</a>
You know you could change your working yours instead of changing "time".<p>Nope. Lets change time twice a year cause health problems, IT problems, car accidents.<p>Its already time to use a global time and stop with this bs of timezones. Timezones are an unreliable way to measure time the relation between time space.
I don't want to stop Daylight Saving Time. I want it year round.<p>The quirk, due to the Uniform Time Act, is that States have a choice -- either <i>never</i> use DST or <i>only</i> use DST during Spring/Summer dates stipulated by Congress.
The same research is quoted again and again...<p>But people do travel in an ever increasing amount over timezones. Often many of them, often more than twice a year. At least here bar opening hours have been significantly deregulated over the last decades. So you can go out and drink until 4am or 5am and obviously people do that.<p>Compared to that the health effects of 1 hour time shift twice a year sound ridiculous to me.
In addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't shift just because someone says the clocks have changed.<p>Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.
In Australia, in Queensland, we've been trying to get this outdated state to start using daylight savings for years.<p>95% of the population is in the south east.<p>In summer, the sun is up at 4:30 AM, which means the birds go off nuts at 4 AM. Sunset is at 6:30 PM.<p>On a side note, listen to this little as@#$%^%^*, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk</a> and imagine him screaming out your windows at 4 AM.<p>Growing up in Europe, I remember the winters to be dark and miserable, but in the summer we had sun till 9:30 PM.<p>There are many true and false arguments PRO and AGAINST DST.<p>The worst I've heard is "it will upset the cows with feed times" and "it will fade more curtains".<p>The best argument I've heard against DST is that it would put the kids coming home from school outside a sun-hour earlier, meaning there is more UV and it is warmer. That's a valid case against, seeing it's so bloody hot here in summer.<p>Another case, PRO DST study concluded that the lack of DST causes people to drive home in peak hour with the sun in their eyes, causing more accidents.<p>At this point, I think DST is still a good thing. It's good for the economy. We don't go out to have dinner in the dark, for example. But I'm getting too old to care.<p>This article's arguments are very thin in my books.
As long as we can all agree to stick to standard time, I will be all for any such motion.<p>If you want to go to permanent DST, that’s gonna have to be a hard no from me, dawg. I’d rather suffer continued switching of hours than move to permanent DST.