Related topics: •  Mind-Body Connection

The Body Clock Guide to Better Health
By Michael Smolensky and Lynne Lamberg
Henry Holt &Co.
428 pp $26

In the dizzying world of real time, we pay more attention to our wristwatches than to the internal clocks we were born with. You know, the ones that determine how crabby you are before your morning cup of joe, when your ulcers act up, or whether you fall asleep at the symphony.

It's all in a book, The Body Clock Guide to Better Health, an intriguing exploration of the biological rhythms that can help us stay healthy or get well quicker, if we can learn to listen to them.

This isn't the 1970s fad we knew as biorhythms, with its numerically divined charts that warned us not to drive or ask for a raise on our bad vibe days. This is about a whole new world of body time called chronobiology -- a mouthful, but worth every syllable, according to co-authors Michael Smolensky, a leading authority in the field, and medical journalist Lynne Lamberg.

They assert that the body's functions ebb and flow according to circadian rhythms, meaning cycles occurring in a 24-hour day. Understanding these rhythms can help us cope with colds and flu, headaches, back pain, insomnia, jet lag, arthritis, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, and countless other physical miseries of human existence.

The book, however, is no dry medical treatise. Consider this fascinating tidbit on page 236: Volunteers infected with cold and flu viruses used the greatest number of tissues between 8 and 11 a.m. Equally riveting, this fact on page 15: The most common time for a bowel movement is between 8 and 9 a.m. (No wonder I can't get into those bathrooms at the train station.)

This is the body clock at work. We wake up because it is light, we go to sleep when it's dark. We may seem to fool our bodies with our digital clocks and endless modern technologies. But reality bonks us on the head every spring and fall. That's when we go on and off daylight savings time and bumble through the following week tired or depressed.

Rhythms are nothing new to women, who have been attuned to monthly cycles and the role that their biological clocks play when it comes to getting pregnant. But for the rest of humanity, including the majority of doctors, the notion of body time is still an evolving field.

It's no accident that this book was written by nonphysicians. Smolensky, an environmental sciences professor, directs the Chronobiology Center, which is part of the University of Texas at Houston's Health Sciences Center. Lamberg reports on biological rhythms and sleep for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Many doctors would flunk an exam that asked them when severe asthma attacks are most likely to occur (between midnight and 6 a.m.) or when blood pressure is highest (between 6 a.m. and noon). In fact, only one in three doctors reports having learned about chronobiology in medical school, according to a Gallup poll conducted for the American Medical Association.

And so, understandably, many would be clueless about the following body clock facts:

•Toothaches are most likely to torture you between 3 and 8 a.m. The pain may be tied to the absence of cortisol, an inflammation fighter, which may be at its lowest at night.

•Backaches are worst at 8 p.m. Gravity makes the disks between the spine's vertebrae collapse slightly during the day, causing pressure on the nerves. When you lie down in the evening, they slowly return to normal, relieving the pressure once again.

•Tension headaches peak between 4 and 5 p.m. These headaches are daytime headaches and usually last 30 minutes or more. Sustained muscle tension is a common trigger, and since most people work daytime hours, this type of headache tends to come at the end of the workday.

•The timing of your dose of medication can aid in healing and help minimize side effects. If you take aspirin to help prevent a heart attack, you will lower your risk of developing stomach irritation if you take it before going to bed rather than early in the morning. Even a single dose of aspirin may cause tiny sores in the lining of the stomach. In a study of volunteers who took aspirin at night and in the morning, those who used it at night had half as many sores.

•Anti-cancer drugs should be delivered at the time they are most effective and easiest on the system. For example, drugs used to treat tumors of the bladder, ovary, and lung are best tolerated in the late afternoon or early evening, and those suffering from cancers of the intestine, colon, and rectum should be treated while sleeping. This is because the body responds to these drugs in different ways at different times of the day.

Here's another item that will make you linger longer in bed: 6 a.m. is the most likely time to die of any cause. Indeed, mornings are full of danger even before folks get behind the wheels of their SUVs. It's well known that heart attacks and strokes occur most often between 6 a.m. and noon.

Just waking up can set this process in motion by causing the heart to beat faster and blood pressure to surge. The stress hormones -- adrenaline, vasopression and cortisol -- pour into your blood, readying you for the day. If fat deposits line your artery walls, the surge of blood pressure can dislodge them, tearing at tissue and causing bleeding. Just as bad, blood platelets, which are stickier in the morning, could clot and block arteries. Not a good time to run a marathon, but do the U.S. Olympics folks know this?

These useful if hair-raising facts are just a few of the medical eye-openers crammed into this 428-page book. But don't be put off by its heft. The first half of the book consists of 15 short chapters detailing the concept of body time and how it affects virtually every facet of our lives, from eating and sleeping to working and exercising.

If you're looking for a specific illness, you can skip to the second part of the book, which is devoted to a glossary of diseases, from AIDS to urinary disorders, as well as "Timewise Tips" to help treat them. For example, if you're an asthma sufferer and like to exercise, do it in the afternoon, when airways are open widest and are least sensitive to environmental pollution and other irritants. Or, if you have evening back pain, lie down in the midafternoon to give the vertebrae in your spine a chance to spread apart.

But if you do skip ahead, you'll miss out on intriguing stuff in the earlier chapters -- like the fact that most people awaken with slight feelings of depression, or that Sunday is the day most married couples prefer to have sex.

Wherever you start in the book, you'll find compelling research to show that when it comes to your body, timing is everything. Pay attention to your body clock and life is good. Instead, humans often do their damnedest to disturb their internal timing mechanisms. We fly coast to coast and suffer from jet lag because our bodies are slow to adjust to time changes.

The same is true of the 15.2 million people in the United States who work nights and suffer sleep and digestive woes. Gastrointestinal problems (commonly called "graveyard gut" after the popular term for the night shift) strike these workers because digestion is largely a daytime function. These wretched souls often make things worse by eating more junk food and drinking more caffeinated and alcoholic drinks.

Nevertheless, The Body Clock was of no help in waking my comatose 13-year-old in the morning. It simply notes that most teens need nine and a quarter hours of sleep a night, even though their adolescent body clocks make it practically impossible for them to fall asleep before 11 p.m. The author's solution? Start school at 9 a.m. Thanks a lot -- I'll run right over to the school board and have them alter those schedules.

I also finally learned the reason for my failed marriage. The book advises that larks, those forbiddingly cheerful morning creatures like my ex, shouldn't marry owls like me, whose slow-rising energies don't peak until 6 p.m. Right. What a load off my mind.

Quibbles aside, I found the book engrossing and even entertaining. This might be one form of clock-watching that should be required.

-- Annie Nakao was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She received a daily news reporting award from the National Association of Black Journalists for her series on the academic achievement of black middle-class students.

Last updated August 26, 2009
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