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Health knowledge made personal
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Health knowledge made personal
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your body is a battleground and resources are allocated according to those various needs. We all need to breathe, have our hearts beat, move, think and so forth. At the same time our immune system requires energy to stave off infections and illness. Stress is an additional burden our body has to deal with. The resources we have at our disposal are not limitless and if you use up more resources to deal with stress, there are fewer resources for the immune system.
Lack of sleep, reduced number of daylight hours, colder temperatures. Remember that our bodies have an internal thermostat and the greater the difference between it and ambient temperature the bigger the 'stress' that must be dealt with. Add to that the fact that everyone around you is also going through winter and dealing with the same stresses and you have a population that is slightly weaker and more vulnerable to getting sick. Once some are sick, it doesn't take long for the bugs to spread, given that in winter we tend to be more shut in and in closer proximity to people.
So in essence, your analysis is correct; more sleep will help you. As will exposure to more sunlight, orange juice and I've even heard that overall happiness is a great resource to fight off infection. Heck, can't hurt!
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Posted by Seth Roberts ..
In the latest New Yorker, an article by Jerome Groopman is about the emergence of even-more-antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
All the easy targets, huh? Here’s an easy target that hasn’t been exploited: Why are colds more common in the winter? Many diseases are more common in the winter. I believe it’s because sleep is worse in the winter. While you are asleep is when your body does its best job of fighting off infection. When I vastly improved my sleep — by standing much more, and by getting more morning light — I vastly reduced the number of easy-to-notice colds that I got. I still got cold infections, I think, but they merely caused me to sleep more than usual for a few days.
Several years ago I noticed an introductory epidemiology course in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health was taught by someone I knew. I called him. “Is your course going to cover what makes our ability to fight off infection go up or down?” I asked. No, he said. That is the usual answer. The question of why colds are more common in the winter is not part of the traditional study of epidemiology.
The connections between sleep and fighting off infection are so strong I’m pretty sure I’m right about this (that colds are more common in the winter because sleep is worse). Why, then, haven’t sleep researchers looked into this? Strangely enough, they may not have thought of it; I haven’t come across this idea in any book about sleep I’ve read. (If you’ve seen it somewhere, please let me know!) Justifications of sleep research tend to revolve around car accidents, which are often caused by too little sleep.
More. My point is not that poorer sleep causes more colds in the winter; it’s that it’s an easy target. Suppose you think the colds/winter connection is caused by less Vitamin D in the winter. An experiment in which one group gets Vitamin D supplements in the winter and another group doesn’t is easy to do, given the great health implications.