Lights Out! Doc: Health Effects in a World that Never Sleeps

Could one of our greatest inventions be causing some of our greatest health problems?

World Broadcast Premiere on CBC Television’s The Nature of Things

Thursday, December 6, 2012, at 8 P.M. (8:30 NT)

The world broadcast premiere of the illuminating new documentary Lights Out! Written and directed by Gemini Award winner Michael McNamara (Acquainted With The Night, Fanboy Confessional, 100 Films & A Funeral), Lights Out! is an important and compelling exploration of the health effects in a world that never sleeps.

The invention of the electric light bulb is one of the greatest technological advancements in history. But scientists have recently discovered that it may also be adversely affecting our health.

Over one million women worldwide are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. But this is a modern disease – the incidence was much lower prior to the 1930s. The international spread was confusing. Rates were high in North America and Europe, and low in Asia.

Once race and diet were ruled out as causes, cancer epidemiologist Dr. Richard Stevens published a paper in the 1980s suggesting a correlation between the increased rates of breast cancer and one of the environmental changes that came with industrialization – light at night. He suggested that longer days and shorter nights were causing a disruption of the human internal body clock, the circadian rhythm.

It was a radical idea at the time, but since then more scientists have been observing and proving the relationship between light at night and diseases such as heart disease, obesity and depression. At a lab in Ohio, hamsters accidently exposed to light at night gained weight and showed signs of clinical depression in a matter of weeks.

“These animals were gaining this body mass without changing the caloric intake and without changing their exercise,” states Dr. Randy Nelson. He believes that light at night can have an immediate impact on our metabolism and mood.

Even though light at night’s effect on health is still a relatively new discovery, the clinical proof is mounting. In July 2012, a report co-authored by Dr. David Blask, Dr. Richard Stevens, Dr. Steven Lockley and Dr. George Brainard was approved by the American Medical Association, officially recognizing that light at night can effect our health and be linked to breast cancer and many common diseases.

Although light at night is a health concern for all, the dangers are particularly high for shift workers. The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study showed that women who had worked a minimum of 3 night shifts a week over an extended period of time had a 70 percent higher risk of breast cancer than those who had done no shift work. Today, in our 24-hour world, 21 percent of Canadians do shift work. So a little light can do a lot of harm.

What can we do about an environmental hazard that we just can’t seem to live without? Lights Out! ventures into the darker side of light to find answers.

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