When it comes to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression, everything you believe is a lie. With research gleaned from the National Institutes of Health, T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby deliver staggering findings: Americans really are sick from being tired. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression are rising in our population. We’re literally dying for a good night’s sleep. Our lifestyle wasn’t always this way. It began with the invention of the lightbulb. When we don’t get enough sleep in sync with seasonal light exposure, we fundamentally alter a balance of nature that has been programmed into our physiology since day one. This delicate biological rhythm rules the hormones and neurotransmitters that determine appetite, fertility, and mental and physical health. When we rely on artificial light to extend our day until 11 p.m., midnight, and beyond, we fool our bodies into living in a perpetual state of summer. Anticipating the scarce food supply and forced inactivity of winter, our bodies begin storing fat and slowing metabolism to sustain us through the months of hibernation and hunger that never arrive. Our own survival instinct, honed over millennia, is now killing us. Wiley and Formby also reveal: -That studies from our own government research prove the role of sleeplessness in diabetes, heart disease, cancer, infertility, mental illness, and premature aging -Why the carbohydrate-rich diets recommended by many health professionals are not only ridiculously ineffective but deadly -Why the lifesaving information that can turn things around is one of the best-kept secrets of our day. Lights Out is one wake-up call none of us can afford to miss. T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby, Ph.D., are researchers who worked together at the Sansum Medical Research Institute at Santa Barbara, California, the site of cutting-edge diabetes research since insulin was first synthesized there in the 1920s. T.S. Wiley is an anthropologist and medical theorist with a background in investigative journalism, currently working in medical research with a special interest in endocrinology/evolutionary biology. Bent Formby holds doctorates in biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Their research has been presented at national and international medical conferences, and in scientific journals. Chapter One: WE WANT TO BELIEVE: The Church of False Gods At sometime in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth. The effect is minuscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on Dom, the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, and other high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere...To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts...People eager to live the longest have built their houses on the highest stilts...They celebrate their youth and walk around naked on their balconies... In time, people have forgotten the reason that higher is better. Nonetheless, they continue to teach their children to shun other children from lower elevations. They have even convinced themselves that the thin air is good for their bodies, and following that logic, have gone on sparse diets, refusing all but the most gossamer food. At length, the populace have become thin like air, bony and old before their time. -Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams In Woody Allen's classic film Sleeper, Miles Monroe, health-food-store owner and clarinetist, checks into Saint Vincent's Hospital in 1977 for a routine procedure. He has a peptic ulcer. When he awakens two hundred years later, he discovers he's died, and a caring aunt has placed him in cryogenic suspension. The plot thickens when two renegade scientists illegally defrost him to take advantage of the fact that he is a numerical nonentity and, as such, can help them overthrow the fascist regime controlling America in 2173. We eavesdrop as they discuss his progress: "Has he asked for anything special?" "For breakfast, he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk." "Ahh, yes, yes, back then people thought of such things as charmed substances that contained life-preserving properties." "You mean there was no deep fat, no steak, or hot fudge?" "Oh, no, those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true." "Incredible!" What's most unnerving about this snippet of filmdom? That social security numbers classify every citizen in a Big Brother-like computer bank, that a fascist regime is controlling America, or that The New England Journal of Medicine released a study in 1998 concluding that fat may actually protect you from heart disease? Could the 1970's nutritional wisdom we've been relying on for decades be completely bogus? What's next? Sleep more or you'll get cancer? Con