Review: The Body Clock Advantage

THE BODY CLOCK ADVANTAGE:
FINDING YOUR BEST TIME OF DAY TO SUCCEED
IN LOVE, WORK, PLAY, EXERCISE

Matthew Edlund, MD
Avon, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 2003
288 pages, paperback, $14.95
ISBN: 1-58062-789-7

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

Few of us manage to get through the day without checking our watches. Many of us know little about the clock in the brain that programs daily life.

This clock prompts us to stay awake in the daytime and sleep at night. It keeps us alert in the daytime, and makes us foggier at night even if work or travel forces us to remain awake then. It boosts trips to the kitchen for snacks in the evening, and makes aspirin taken in the morning hang around in the bloodstream longer than aspirin taken in the evening. It determines why you get a greater buzz from caffeine in midafternoon, and feel alcohol's effects more strongly after midnight. The body clock also makes it easier or harder to whack a golf ball, balance your checkbook, or spot errors on an assembly line at different times of day.

Tuning into your inner cycles can help improve your health, performance, and relationships, Mathew Edlund, MD, asserts in this book. To support this claim, Edlund draws on a decade of practicing body clock medicine in Sarasota, Florida, where he directs the Gulf Coast Sleep Institute.

Consider our diet. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers who survived by enduring times of famine and starvation. We are built to hold onto every calorie we ingest, and particularly, to crave salt, sugar, and fat. "The wonder is not that so many of us are obese," Edlund says, "but how few." Weight control demands more than simply counting calories. The types of foods you eat and when you eat them also exert a potent influence on body weight.

We awaken from sleep, after eight or more hours without food, in a starvation mode. Skipping breakfast tells the brain to hold onto existing fuel stores. Eating breakfast gives us more energy for the day ahead. As a bonus for weight control, we burn the first meal of the day rapidly. We tend to store as fat the food we eat at night. The old adage, "breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, sup like a pauper," still holds, Edlund says. Adding a pre- or post-lunch walk, or other more vigorous exercise, also helps keep weight down.

The Body Clock Advantage provides daily meal plans, including advice for sticking to your diet in restaurants. It illuminates the challenges of finding a meal plan that works for you by detailing the trials of a one-time breakfast hater.

Edlund instructs his patients to use strategically timed bright light, exercise, naps, socializing—LENS, for short—to keep body clocks on time, maximize daytime alertness, and shift rhythms when work schedules or travel demands. US military troops far from home, obliged to work around the clock, will benefit from following a LENS approach, he says, to improve their battlefield performance and curb fatigue. Indeed, modern military preparedness incorporates many findings from recent advances in sleep and biological clock research.

Edlund cites numerous patients' experiences to explore tactics for improving sleep, coping with shift work, minimizing jet lag, managing medical illness, getting more out of exercise, and, for couples, resolving conflicts that often arise when one partner is a morning person and the other a night person. This anecdotal approach helps readers envision ways to incorporate recent advances in understanding body clocks into their daily lives.

The book's conversational style makes for easy reading. The reader has to take much of the information here on faith, though, since Edlund cites few sources. Lack of an index may hamper your efforts to relocate specific topics. Overall, however, The Body Clock Advantage provides a good introduction to how body clocks work, and why they matter.