Upon awakening Sunday morning, you’ll find yourself with an extra hour. Not only will it be a pleasant gift, but researchers have delivered a study informing us that it could be good for your heart.
Swedish researchers examined 20 years of records and found that heart attacks declined by 5 percent on the Monday after clocks were rolled back, possibly due to the extra sleep.
Good news, right? Unfortunately, moving clocks ahead in the spring appears to have the opposite effect. Not so good.
Every six months, there is a certain amount of grumbling and debate about the relative merits and detractions of switching the clock forward and back to take fuller advantage of natural light.
Better for school kids catching the bus. Worse for farmers. Better for retail outlets. Worse for people who work across time zones and have to keep track of which states use daylight-saving time.
The debate has raged over the past century. And when Congress in 2005 devised a plan to push back daylight- saving time to November — ostensibly an effort to save energy — it guaranteed the controversy will continue for the time being.
We’ll be the first to applaud if Congress decides to revert back to at least the pre-2005 tinkering-with- time system.
As far as the heart attack risk issue goes, some doctors have made the pragmatic observation that if people stopped smoking tobacco and did a better job watching their diets, it would have a lot more effect on their health than the time change.
Now there’s something to think about during that “extra” hour Sunday morning.
