Issue 120, Summer 2002
----------------------------------------

THE HEALING DARK

Kids sleep like rocks. One night long ago when I was eight and my brother 11, we were zonked out in heavy slumber on the front and back seats of the family Chevy, parked across from our parents' grocery store on a rural street in New Jersey. Soon, the folks would shut up shop and Pop would drive us all home and to bed. My brother and I finally got dredged up from slumbrous depths by the noisy crowd around the car. About a half-hour before, a driver had careened into the Chevy with a big enough crash to bring our folks and all the neighbors running. Once Mom and Pop saw we were okay they didn't bother to wake us.

Oh, to be able to sleep like that now! This sleep thing we do all our lives turns out to be, from the scientist's view, infinitely complex. LIGHTS OUT by T.S. Wiley with Brent Formby PhD [Pocket Books, New York, 2001] stresses this complexity: it took Wiley 5 years to write the not-easy-to-follow -200- page text with its more than 100 pages of scientific references. The insights I've gained seem fresh to me, but I've never explored sleep science - these may be old hat to experts. LIGHTS OUT reminds us that before the 20th century cheap electricity to illuminate homes and streets did not exist. Forced to rely on firelight, candles, oil or gas lamps, etc., people were not in the habit of staying up late.

It wasn't until 1879 that Thomas A. Edison created a practical incandescent lamp, then in 1881-2 the first permanent central electric- light power plant in the world (in New York City). Wiley writes: "A 100-watt bulb costs 33 cents at any Home Depot. In 1883, the same amount of light would have cost the consumer $1,445...In 1910, the average adult was still sleeping nine to ten hours a night."

The sun's energy, she says, "is the catalyst for all life. The amount of light that hits you informs your 'system controls' about the rotation and orbit of the planet we live on ..." When you don't sleep in sync with seasonal light exposure, you "fundamentally alter a balance of nature."

The Hibernation Hypothesis

How so? Well, it seems we humans still are hardwired to respond to summer's longer days and shorter nights as the proper time to gorge on its seasonal fruits, berries, starchy roots, tubers, etc" in order to store a lot of it as fat in preparation for winter's scarcity, *

She writes: "Obesity was the key to survival, the key adaptation for all mammals, In order to put on enough fat for the winter, you had to become insulin resistant," [My emphasis CP.] As a consequence of insulin resistance, the receptors in your muscle cells become less responsive to insulin, taking in less blood sugar (glucose). Thus glucose is free to go to tissues where more of it can be turned into fat **

In the natural world of winter scarcity, mammals gradually use up stored fat or, as many animal do, sleep it off. "Mammal studies concur that once you start the hibernation preparation cycle, hyperlipidemia (high cholestero1), high blood pressure, and insulin resistance (leading to obesity) are normal states that resolve themselves with the extended sleep that follows in nature."

But the "unending artificial light we live in registers as the long days of summer" on our sensitive internal sundial. Now "we don't sleep and we don't starve, either; at least, we don't starve for carbohydrates. That's why we're fat and getting fatter. It's endless August," Wiley informs us.

"The diseases that we know to correlate with obesity -- high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression-are all really the result of a vestigial hibernation instinct brought on by too much artificial light."

Skewed Hormones!

She tells us that "one of the evolutionary functions of melatonin [a hormone we make during sleep. CF] is it enhances the appetite-suppressing effect of leptin [another molecule - we make. CF] so you stay asleep instead of roaming around hungry all night. It's a feedback loop: melatonin enhances leptin and leptin keeps your brain in the 'fed' stage, so you stay asleep and make more melatonin."

So chronically shortened slumber time means you make less melatonin--secreted only in the dark - and less leptin, which heightens your appetite for munchies.

Wiley writes: . "In the hormonal state brought on by long hours of light, the urge to consume carbohydrates or drink alcohol to put on a fat base for upcoming winter becomes metabolically and psychologically impossible to resist.."

*In case you've forgotten, glucose derived from natural sugars and starches, i.e., from dietary carbohydrates, is metabolized in your body to become an energy producer by a series of enzyme-driven steps ("glycolysis") that produces pyruvic acid. Pyruvic acid and a huge molecule called coenzyme A then can combine to form acetyI-CoA, which happens to be the starter molecule from which our clever bodies can make fats. (Acetyl-CoA also is retrieved when fats are metabolized.)

Acetyl-CoA is a key molecule because (1) it's needed to make fats, as noted; (2) it's required for cholesterol synthesis; and (3) it's the "starter" for the great Krebs or Citric Acid Cycle -- the final common pathway for the oxidation of carbohydrates, lipids, and protein that provides your cells with magic ATP molecules that get transformed into energy to drive your whole mechanism. (You can make fat not just from carbos, but also from dietary fat. By some hard-to- fathom reasoning, T.S. Wiley says dietary fat can't make you fat [p. 184], but all my biochemistry texts dispute this.)

**The extra fat not only becomes fuel for energy and heat during leaner, chillier times, it also serves to insulate your internal organs from the cold. From high carbo intake, you'd make extra cholesterol, too, that would stabilize your cell membranes, plus protect them from freezing. Also, abundant glucose in blood would act like anti-freeze does in a car.

,.
Another reversal of hormonal rhythm caused by staying up late means insulin and cortisol stay high during sleep when they should be flat, while "cortisol falls so late it won't come up normally in the morning." That's a big reason, she says, for the morning grogginess countless people endure.

Sleep Enhances Your Immune System
A theory by scientist Carsten Korth1 described in the book says your gut bacteria, the friendly ones, nevertheless exude endotoxins over the course of each day, which could get you into trouble by breaching your blood-brain barrier and harming nerve tissue. He suggests that when a threshold level of these endotoxins gets into the central nervous system (CNS), it triggers fatigue and sleepiness. During slumber, your immune system kicks in to clear the toxins, etc. from the CNS and restore impermeability of your blood-brain barrier. (This theory helps to explain your great need for sleep when you're sick.)

What Can You Do?

To struggle with your human heritage may not be easy, but in the face of today's epidemic of Type II diabetes and obesity -- all tied in to insulin resistance--it makes sense to search for clues in wiser sleep and diet patterns.

* For seven months of the year starting in fall, Wiley says to eat meat, fowl, fish, eggs, cheese and green stuff and very little carbohydrate, 25 to 45 grams per day.

Samples of 9-gram portions of carbos:
1 cup green beans, 1/4 cup lentils or cooked beans, 1 peach, 1 tangerine, 1/2 slice bread.

* Go to bed earlier, turn off TV after 9 p.m., shield all blinking lights.

* Push for 9.5 hours of sleep in a really dark room.

As compensation, come summer, she says it's okay to stay up later and live it up.

Scientific think-tanks including the National Institutes of Health have been looking into the subject seriously for at least a decade.

Wiley writes: "When we asked Dr. Thomas Wehr, the head of the department studying seasonal and circadian rhythmicity at the NIH in Washington, whether he felt the public had the right to know that on less than 9.5 hours of sleep at night -- i.e., in the dark -- they will (a) never be able to stop eating sugar, smoking, and drinking alcohol and (b) most certainly develop one of the following conditions: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, infertility, mental illness, and/or premature aging, he said, "Well, yes, they do have a right to know. They should be told; but it won't change anything. Nobody will ever turn off the lights."

Yes, but obesity + Type II diabetes now approach epidemic levels in our kids. Television, video games, net-surfing, etc. are the new bedtime stories. The primary message these electronic signals keep sending to young brains is: "You don't need to sleep."

1. C. Korth, "A Co-Evolutionary Theory of Sleep," Medical Hypotheses, 1995, vol 45, 304-10.

THE SUNNY SIDE OF CYANIDE

" Broccoli chemical kills stomach cancer bug" was a nice-sized San Francisco Chronicle headline on May 28, bringing joy to veggie-lovers everywhere, and to Felix Letter aficionados in particular. The findings reported in the May 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showed that the chemical, sulforaphane, "killed helicobacter pylori, a bacteria that causes stomach ulcers and often fatal stomach cancers.

"And the good news is there appears to be enough of it in broccoli sprouts and some varieties of broccoli to benefit people who eat the vegetables."

Dr. Paul Talalay of Johns Hopkins U. School of Medicine "had previously reported sulforaphane is an effective anti-cancer agent and the new studies extended that work to the bacteria that cause stomach cancer and ulcers."

And Closer To Home...

My 'investment' in alerting readers to healing powers in plant substances closely related to sulforaphane goes back to FL# 69 in 1993, which first explored the history of medical uses of sulfocyanate, an earlier term for thiocyanate.

Sulphoraphane in broccoli, it so happens, is an isothiocyanate, i.e., a derivative of thiocyanate. Sulphoraphane and thiocyanate both have the same fundamental cyanate and sulfur components.. ("Theion" means "sulfur" in Greek.)

Thiocyanate normally is found in your body fluids such as plasma, saliva, urine. Plasma thiocyanate levels appear to be related to your intake of thiocyanate and/or cyanate from edible plant sources, which happen to be extraordinarily plentiful in nature and attractive to many creatures including humans. Since cyanate (from cyanide) can be toxic, your body attaches sulfur to it (mainly from sulfur-containing amino acids like cysteine in protein foods), transforming it handily into thiocyanate.

It Seems to Have Many Uses
Conventional medicine since the 1940s has shown minimal interest in thiocyanate. This may change, now that a derivative of thiocyanate is being hailed as both anti- bacterial and anti-cancer agents. But in the 1930s and '40s, potassium thiocyanate was prescribed medically to lower high blood pressure.

From FL#69: "Other early medical reports said thiocyanate was a strong bactericide (this was before the penicillin era) and a useful remedy for dysentery. It also reduced the frequency and severity of migraine headaches."

C loser to our own times, in the 1974 Proceedings of the First National Symposium On Sickle Cell Disease, scientists in the National Institutes of Health reported thiocyanate to be the best anti-sickling substance (in test tubes) of all likely substances tested. Its effects, they concluded, were "profound."

In recent experiments, Oklahoma biochemist Oji Agbai employed highly magnified scanning electron micrographs to demonstrate similarly "profound" resistance to sickling of red blood cells [rbc's] from sickle cell patients, but only after he added an optimal concentration of thiocyanate to test tubes containing their blood samples. A less-than-optimal concentration did not stop sickling of rbc's.

He says this implies sickle cell patients need to make conscientious efforts to keep their own plasma thiocyanate high enough to discourage sickling of rbc's.. (Sickled rbc's not only cause poor delivery of oxygen to tissues, but are so fragile they rupture easily, creating intractable anemia.) Dr. Agbai believes plant foods supplying thiocyanate and/or cyanate may need to be consumed at every meal. To augment this, he developed and patented a thiocyanate supplement, Dioscovite. *

*Dr. Agbai can be contacted re Dioscovite and his book, Sickle Cell Anemia: A Solution At Last, at Natural Health Research Institute, 6390 E. 31st St., Suite E, Tulsa, OK 74135. Tel & FAX: (918) 627-7997.

A Remedy From Nature?

Last summer, Dr. Agbai, who grew up in West Africa, was invited by the governor of Ebonyi State to give talks across Nigeria to doctors, scientists, and educators about native foods that traditionally prevented inheritors of sickle cell genes from suffering the life- threatening forms the disease has taken in urban Africa today, similar to its lethal aspect in the USA. He also described case studies of Dioscovite's effectiveness and safety in improving hemoglobin and hematocrit levels without transfusions in terribly anemic sicklers in the USA

To doctors in Nigeria, his talks about the healing powers of thiocyanate derived from their own traditional plant foods came as a revelation -- they were all trained in western medicine which, of course, doesn't yet have a clue!

The splendid news is Dioscovite has just been accepted and registered as a food supplement by the Office of Drug Registration & Regulatory Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria. Soon, a number of doctors in Nigeria will be conducting their own trials, observing effects on sickle cell patients of Dioscovite and regional foods such as African yam, manioc, and sorghum.

Cherished foods, not just broccoli, turn out to be sources of thiocyanate and/or potentially toxic cyanate, including mung bean sprouts, lima beans, chickpeas, bitter almonds, apricot kernels, radish sprouts, cabbage, mustard greens, collard greens, kale, brussel sprouts, turnip, turnip greens, cauliflower, macadamia nuts, flaxseed, blackberries, and raspberries.

Maybe, just maybe, there are lessons for us to learn from nature's design.**

**All of the above probably is familiar stuff to longtime FL readers, but a refresher course is available from FL issues 69, 71, 72, 75, 77/78, 82, 85, 86, 87, 105/106, 107, 108 (to correct my errors in 107!), & 118.

_________________________________________________________________________

THE FELIX LETTER, P.O. Box 7094, Berkeley CA 94707, has been published independently by Clara Felix since 1981, supported by subscriptions. She now publishes it quarterly.

Descriptive list of issues & sample: $1 Subscriptions USA, Canada (US funds):

6 issues (1-1/2 yrs): $12
12 issues (3 years): $22

All rights reserved.