Collagen – We Really are Becoming Unglued!

And there are still more possible factors explaining the dramatic recent increases in autoimmune diseases such as hay fever, eczema, type 1 diabetes, and more. Collagen is the glue that holds us together, the human version of duct tape, as it were, - a complex of protein molecules that exist between our cells to anchor them to each other. Collagen failures are now becoming very much a focus of heart and hypertension research. A scattering of very significant studies show that collagen formation appears to be very different during the night than during the day. It is as if, perhaps, quick and dirty repairs that are “good enough for now” are made during the day, but real craftsmanship – the painstaking building of truly strong collagen – is intended to occur only during darkness, when there are far fewer demands on our energy and other resources. In the night, in the absence of the day hormone (steroid) aldosterone, far more solid, robust collagen seems to be formed. However, given how many systems are upset (compromised) by our shortened days in the modern world; it's also possible that the largest reason why many of us don't seem to be making enough very high quality collagen during day or night is simply that this requires quite large amounts of energy, and our mitochondria are no longer up to the job, for the reasons given above. In other words, it's possible that metabolic syndrome is at the root of nearly all modern chronic illness, and that the three pathways I've mentioned are really just one pathway. Weaker collagen is more easily damaged, and this seems trigger a compensatory process of arterial thickening and stiffening that precedes hypertension and heart disease. It also can help set up autoimmune diseases, since such damage introduces many more bits and pieces of ourselves into the blood stream, that must be cleaned up thoroughly lest they be confused with invading pathogens.

We've listed a lot of processes that are supposed to happen at night, in real darkness. Our bodies may be doing very different things during the night than they do during the day, but they are very busy at a microscopic level, nonetheless. And all of these functions are vital, literally – rats subjected to constant light die. We mess around with this business of night and day by using artificial light to banish darkness at our peril.

Of course, we won't get sick immediately - particularly if our ancestors were of European stock. Many of our bodies have evolved or been designed to cope with the seasons in northern latitudes, which included periods of short days (and occasional lightening storms) – matched by periods of very long nights later on in the year. In industrial countries however, we are now literally burning the candle at both ends – sleeping into the morning light, and then sitting under electric lights long after sunset until we all but collapse with fatigue into bed, still exposed to at least some stray light, even while we sleep. We stay up long into what used to be darkness both summer and winter. Since melatonin only rises gradually to its peak levels during a long night, most modern human beings never experience a full night, or a normal nightly dose of melatonin (or perhaps only rarely during prolonged camping trips.) Those whose bedrooms have small but bright lights from fire detectors, LEDs, streetlight reflections, etc, or who interrupt their nights by turning the lights on, experience much less melatonin, etc, still. It's no wonder that caregivers or modern soldiers, in particular, are very vulnerable to a wide variety of subsequent chronic illnesses, as the evidence shows they are.

But melatonin doesn't switch on all at once, or turn off in the morning all at once. It very gradually increases during the night to a peak, and then declines again well before we experience light again. Measuring the area under that gradually increasing curve during the night we find that getting having half as many hours of darkness each day means getting, at the most, only about one quarter as much melatonin (and perhaps all the hormones and processes it triggers) as our bodies require for true health – not even half. And we can might get only half of that again if we flip on a light in the middle of the night, sleep in after dawn, suffer from sleep-disordered breathing, don't keep very consistent hours, experience much steroid-releasing noise during the night, etc, etc, etc. It's no wonder at all that the industrial world is being hammered with so much chronic illness, that diabetes has zoomed up from being a very rare disease to one that affects one-third of Americans. It's no wonder either that rapidly developing nations such as China, are seeing rates of (once rare) heart disease and diabetes climb so rapidly that they may soon exceed our own: “Vascular disease and cancer have become the leading causes of death among Chinese adults.” [16162883] “a large proportion of Chinese adults have the metabolic syndrome and that overweight has become an important public health problem in China.” [15836888] The suddenness of this change is beyond shocking: “the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children aged 7-18 years increased 28 times... between 1985 and 2000.” [http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/333/7564/362] Yet this is what the research we now have in hand concerning the photoperiod effect would in lead us to expect.

But don't imagine that just swallowing melatonin will make up for this lack of darkness. It won't. If nothing else, in the presence of light steroids will likely interfere with the cascade of all sorts of other hormonal reactions, immune cycles, etc, that melatonin is supposed to trigger. To stay healthy you need the dark, uninterrupted dark, beginning and ending at constant times, and considerably more of it than we are now getting. Just popping pills, melatonin or otherwise, won't do the trick. And taking melatonin can easily cause that night-time hormone to slop over into the day, further messing up a proper daily hormonal cycle.

As mentioned earlier, there are of course many other factors that adversely affect our health too, there's no question about that – hydrogenated oils, diluted food values, processed foods, far fewer rarer foods, organic solvents, lead, and much more. But again, most of these other factors turn out to be destructive at least in part because they impose very substantial metabolic burdens on the body – just at a moment in history when our our bodies are no longer functioning very well. We now have little metabolic energy to spare, and cannot easily cope with unusual demands and maintain good health. Even chromosome damage can usually be fixed – but it does cost a lot of energy to make those repairs, and our metabolisms are often over the red-line now, unable to address additional environmental insults. While we do want to address all these other issues too, we can't expect widespread improvements in health in industrialized nations until metabolic problems, stemming largely from unnaturally long days, are addressed. So in a moment we'll take a closer look at just how long days and artificially short nights may be reducing the energy available to our bodies.