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UNH Sustainable Agriculture student, Allie Pisano, ’22, follows HB 85 relative to using Atlantic Standard Time in New Hampshire.
University of New Hampshire students explore the science behind the underlying aspects of current issues under consideration at New Hampshire's State House.
From UNH Cooperative Extension, this is Relative to New Hampshire.
Step into the classroom and listen in while group of UNH students explore the underlying aspects of current issues under consideration at New Hampshire's State House. We pick apart those issues and connect with experts. All to share with you, insights from our scientific community that enhance our understanding of the biological world right here in New Hampshire, home of the greatest democracy in the world.
Anna: I’m your moderator, Dr. Anna Kate Wallingford. In this limited run podcast series you’ll be hearing from several of our brilliant and talented UNH Science Liaisons, who have been spending this spring semester investigating serious topics. But this one, HB 85, was supposed to be a fun one.
Here at Cooperative Extension, our mission is to strengthen people and communities in New Hampshire by providing trusted (science-based) knowledge, practical education and cooperative solutions. That being said, we are not allowed to support or oppose any bill being heard by the legislature within the bounds of our work here at UNH. Typically, this space is not the place for personal opinions. This is a space where we ask questions. This is an exercise in scientific curiosity. This is not an easy task for most human beings. Our science liaisons included.
So when I saw that our legislature was considering a shift to Atlantic Standard Time, I thought this would be a “fun one” where I would let my liaisons blow off some steam by expressing their personal opinions about whether they would support or oppose this change. I didn’t think there would be any scientific discovery going on here. Boy was I wrong. You’ll hear how little we understood the situation the first time I brought it up amongst the group.
Anna: I actually speaking of that I did put one on the list that I just put on for my own curiosity which is Connecticut is thinking about switching to the Atlantic timezone. And so New Hampshire now has a bill that says if Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine switch to the Atlantic timezone, we're going to switch too.
Ella: Wait, what does that mean?
Allie: So that means like all the time would change here? It would all be I don’t know...
Marissa: Would New York change? I know sometimes Eastern Standard time is called New York time.
Anna: I don’t understand… because Nova Scotia and the Bahamas are currently in the Atlantic time zone, and for whatever reason, I mean sometimes I think it gets dark really late here but …I was thought that was because like, we're really far north.
Ella: so that would mean it would be lighter in the evening? That would be strange.
Allie: Personally I see it as causing nothing but issues, like, how do you get everyone on the same page with that.
Anna: What’s the benefit?
Allie: yeah, right, time is made up anyways
Anna: So if anybody's interested in that maybe go to the hearing, because what they'll probably say is like, oh well Connecticut does it we'll do it too, but like there's no chance that like Maine, Massachusetts or Connecticut would switch to the Atlantic time and we would say eastern time.
Ella: I feel like I kind of support that.
Anna: I feel like this might be the issue that tears this group apart. Ella, why would you support this shift to the Atlantic time zone?
Ella: Because its too dark in the winter in the evening here. I don’t care if its light in the morning. I want more evening time where its light out. If that’s the way it would go? I’m still confused about the impact it would have.
Anna: Because, what time does it get dark here now?
Emily: Now? Like 5:30?
Anna: So sunset would happen at 6:30 instead of 5:30.
Emily: Yeah, that sounds nice.
Allie: It would be nice. But what about in the summer? It’s already light until like 8, in the summer.
Marissa: We’d have to give up daylight savings. Because I think the normal time is the one that we’re in in the winter and then daylight savings is in the summer…or maybe it’s the other way around? I don’t know.
Anna: Did you hear that moment of realization when we all landed on the possibility of getting rid of daylight savings time? That ah! The idea of switching to Atlantic Time for a portion of the year so that we could get rid of daylight savings time started sounding a little better. Allie Pisano, Junior studying Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at UNH, did some follow up work on how decision-makers in the region are landing on this issue.
Anna: Allie, did you get a chance to check out the time zone bill?
Allie: I did. It’s really interesting. This is the second time that it's been like through the house. The last time it was passed by the House, but it was shot down by the senate and that was in 2017, and it's pretty much the same bill being passed through again. But I think it might be passed through again because other states in New England are also passing bills like this like almost every state except New York. I think they have passed something that's contingent on the other states in New England doing stuff so like in New Hampshire, we’ll do it potentially we’ll do it If Massachusetts and Maine does it, and Maine says they'll do it if us and Massachusetts do it, and then Connecticut says they'll do it if Rhode Island, and Massachusetts do it. I couldn't find what Rhode Island was saying but I know they have one. So it's all very I don't know … I don't think it's going to happen personally because looking at it, it just seems like it's everybody's saying well, we'll do it if everybody else does, but there's no one who's taking that initiative.
I did see some, some congress people in Connecticut, were saying just about it, that they think it could help with seasonal depression, which I thought was a really interesting take on it and he was saying, you know like mental health is really important in the winter up here and this could really help with that. And I remember when we were talking about it the other week, everybody was like, I’d love another hour of sunlight, like it’d make me feel better. I think that's a really interesting take on it and I wasn't sure what experts they would be because I was thinking like, experts on time?
Anna: Well…I was thinking I have a colleague out in California who studies circadian rhythms in flies? But I don't know I think that this bill is probably just going to be the one bill that I feel like we can all weigh in with our opinions, like I'm really making everybody hold back their opinions on every other bill we're working on. I feel like the switch to Atlantic timezone might be something that I feel comfortable that we can all say. “This is how I feel about this.”
I just wanted to know if you had gotten any updates as far as like how the legislators like the members of the legislature felt about it? But it sounds like not yet?
Allie: Well, it seems to be easier to find other New England states on this. I think that they're a little ahead of the game. Like what we're doing seems to be a reaction to them. It seems like a lot of people are really supportive of it, like in Connecticut, they said oh this is a bipartisan issue, you know like we, we have bipartisan support for this.
Anna: Well as chance would have it, I happened to be talking to that colleague, Dr. Joanna Chiu, Associate Professor in the Department of Entomology & Nematology at University of California, Davis. We were talking about unrelated things and brought this bill up, saying I wasn’t sure if this was a silly issue or not. She responded with a resounding “not silly at all”! This is a serious public health issue and she sent me some materials one of her professional organizations, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms had produced to promote the understanding of this as a public health issue. She did us one better and joined us for a chat about her work and how light health impacts us all.
Dr. Joanna Chiu: I’ll tell you a little bit about my research to kind of set the background for what we’re going to talk about. To set the scientific basis of daylight savings. My lab studies biological timing. We study biological timing in different time frames, mostly circadian rhythyms, which is 24 hour rhythms, and how biology changes over the time of the day, which is actually a lot. But more recently in the last four or five years we've also started working on seasonal timing, which also apparently changes biology quite a bit. And Anna actually works on that.
Anna: The basics of what we need to understand in order to understand how daylight savings affects animals, or by animals I mean us, might be to talk a little bit about like health, like, how do we how do we sense diurnal changes in light like how does light play into how we sense the world around us?
Dr. Chiu: Yeah. So light, if you think about circadian rhythms. You know, every one of us has an endogenous clock. That's basically the machinery that my lab studies, and the clock is kind of special so once you set the clock, using environmental signals. The clock is endogenous and keeps running and running and running. And one of the signals that’s actually the strongest environmental cue to set the clock is the light:dark cycle. It's not surprising, right, because this is one of the thing that keeps, it's pretty consistent for our planet, over years and years now, evolution.
So the light:dark cycle is the strongest signal. There are other signals that can set your clock, but light is the most important one you can think of, the strongest time cue. What happens is, it goes through the eyes in humans and other animals - in insects it goes with the cuticle it's a little bit different - but in humans and in mammals, it goes through the retina, and then down the optic nerve. There's this sort of special region in the hypothalamus, that's where all the sort of the central clock machinery is. For instance, folks who are actually blind or individuals who cannot sense light, they have constantly have disrupted circadian rhythms. So light is important in setting the clock but it's setting the clock, if you, you know, in reference to the daylight savings - to the Sun time. The solar time… not the time on our iPhone. This is the confusion, you know, for people talking about daylight savings versus standard time is, it’s your clock, it's actually aligned to the sun time. Not the social time.
Anna: That’s the thing that stood out to me most about the infographic you sent me. That it's not just the disruption with changing the clocks that we're talking about, it's the fact that here in New England, we're so far east in our time zone that we are affected differently than somebody who's maybe in the center of the time zone. Can you tell us a little bit more about like the social time and the clock time and how misalignment might affect our health?
Dr. Chiu: Well let’s talk about some examples of things our clocks control. The circadian clock is regulating all kinds of physiology and behavior of humans and other animals and even in plants and bacteria and everything. Clocks regulate your body temperature, your testosterone secretion, alertness, blood pressure, muscle tone, energy use efficiency, you know, cardiovascular efficiency, all kinds of things.
One of the best examples to sort of explain how your body can align to social time versus solar time is how clocks regulate your sleep:wake cycle. So this is how it does it. The circadian clock actually regulates a hormone called melatonin. This hormone, usually goes up at around two hours before you're about to go to bed, according to the sun time. Okay. Like for example 8 PM, your melatonin will go up. That's the sleep hormone that causes you to want to go to sleep. You get tired you want to go to sleep. You want to watch more TV, or do whatever you do, and then it goes up, and it's at peak level in the middle of the night. But what happens is, it will go back down about a couple hours before you are supposed to get up and you start being alert. This is actually the level of melatonin going down that causes you to actually get up in the morning. All this, it's aligning to the solar time the sun time, not the social time, which is the clock that we keep changing back and forth.
Marissa: In the problem on the actual day we switch and that like giant jump? Whereas like seasonally, obviously, we get more sun during the summer, but that's kind of a gradual change. So is it the actual changeover, or is it also actually existing in daylight saving time is also leading to the misalignment too?
Dr. Chiu: Its not just the switch, it’s the difference between the sun time and the social time. That's the misalignment. This switch makes it worse like well the spring forward makes it worse, that causes the bigger misalignment. So for example here this graphic, you'll see, at least on the West Coast of each time zone, you have standard times and this alignment is actually just one hour. What happens is when you have daylight savings, which is now the misalignment for us, it's actually two hours. Our body is listening to the sun time, but we have to follow the social time to live in this society. I put you guys on the eastern edge standard time is perfect. You guys have no misalignment in standard time. But what happens is in daylight savings which is now you guys actually have a one hour misalignment. When you're supposed to go to bed, your body telling you that you can't go to bed yet. That's the thing, because social time is different than the sun time.
Allie: So I have a sun lamp at home and it's definitely marketed as something used to reset your sleep cycle with this sunlamp. Is that healthy?
Dr. Chiu: Depending on when you're using it, right? You have to use it at the right time. Hopefully they give you the proper instructions on how to use it. Basically, blue light, blue spectrum light, shorter wavelength light, is the kind of light that your circadian system is sensitive to. So that's why when you have your phone and your computer you have what’s called Night Mode. So now it's for reddish kind yellowish color you can actually to the computer and screens to be like that. That’s supposed to be more healthy, even though you still have light, at least it's not the wavelength that your circadian system is sensitive to. Everybody worries about light at night but it's also whether you're getting enough light in the daytime. We have issues on both sides. We are getting too much light at night, when we're not supposed to, and that's why a lot of people are actually having sleep issues. The second thing is we're not getting enough light in the daytime, because we’re always staying indoors. Especially now.
Max: Speaking of melatonin, because it's pretty important than this whole circadian rhythm is, is it problematic to stay awake when your melatonin production is high? Does it affect your cognitive function at all? Or is that just makes us want to sleep?
Dr. Chiu: One of the impacts of melatonin – because melatonin is trying to get you to go to sleep - it definitely affects your cognitive ability. So that’s one of the effects of melatonin. It’s not just to actually make you go to sleep. But then you have cortisol, is sort of the other thing, when melatonin goes up, cortisol goes down. Cortisol is helping you with cognitive ability and staying alert and those kinds of things so definitely. When you're supposed to sleep, your melatonin, your sleep hormone is telling you to go to sleep, you should.
Max: So that's what I was wondering so the sunsets and, socially we’re supposed to stay up much later, you think we could be performing, not as well cognitively?
Dr. Chiu: Definitely, definitely.
Allie: Do you think people taking melatonin at night, like before they go to bed as a supplement, is that messing up their cycles?
Dr. Chiu: Actually, so some of my colleagues do recommend them. Like let's say there's been a condition, they do recommend that to their patients. You have to be careful about the dosage, because I think a lot of people take too much of it.
What happens is that you also have to take it at the right time. You're not supposed to take it when you're just about to go to bed. That's too late. You're supposed to take it, you know, maybe an hour or two before you, you want to go to bed. It's the timing in the dosage. For some people it does help.
Emily: How do people like really far north areas - where there's either a ton of sunlight in a day or not at all - how do they cope with that?
Dr. Chiu: Yeah, it's, I don't think it's very natural. I mean, it also depends on where your ancestors come from. By ancestors, I mean way back, not like your grandparents. There's adaptation going on for people living at different latitudes. For a lot of those folks who actually lived in the Arctic Circle, or you know, way down in the tip of Chile or whatever, their clock is actually entrained when you have good balance of light and dark. What happens is when they get into the part of the season where you have constant light or constant dark, like many hours of light, versus not so much fo darkness. Their clock keeps going. There are other cues besides light that help them keep their time. For example, they usually keep their timing of meals, and food is also a very strong time to for setting clocks. So, its not just light, they have other things that keep that cycle going. I personally don't think that humans should be living those spaces. ..joking! joking!
Anna: Well you met you mentioned food is another cue that, that, that sets circadian rhythm, was that like an insulin signal or, or what are some other things that that set rhythmns.
Dr. Chiu: Yeah So food is a very strong signal, Actually, that's one of the things my lab studies a lot is how food is interpreted by the circadian timing system, as time cues. Have you guys heard about intermittent feeding fasting and time restricted eating.
Anna: Yeah, we have a couple of a couple of nutrition students here.
Dr. Chiu: Oh okay, yeah. So, I can tell you that if you align light and dark entrainment signals with food entrainment signals that will be the best. And I used to eat very late at night, because I don't care about my own health, I guess, even though I study circadian rhythm and health. But what, since I started researching about time restricted eating and then food as a time que. I've stopped eating after seven basically no popcorn no beer, beer counts because it has carbohydrates. And so what happens is when you're eating at nighttime, you're basically telling your body that it's daytime, it has similar effect, as almost like light at night and pushing your melatonin level later. If you eat earlier, because think about it like you have all these enzymes that help you to digest food and utilize new energies and new intake right. All those things are regulated by circadian rhythms. So if you're eating at the wrong time, your body will be basically in chaos you won't be able to actually digest food with high efficiency and utilize them in the best way for energy, so your energy use, and intake is going to be off. And this causes diabetes, obesity, metabolic disorders cardiovascular diseases, all kinds of things. So always think of food as light, just follow what your ancestors do.
Anna: Find more information from the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms on the dangers of daylight savings time. For more on circadian rhythms, check out Dr. Chiu’s lab website at clocklab.org.
As for HB 85, this bill passed through the house committee but was found Inexpedient to Legislate by the senate committee, just like last year. However, I know I’ve made some changes to improve my light health after speaking to Dr. Chiu, and I’ve been sleeping better– honest to goodness. Now to cut out snacking after dark! I asked the group to provide their conclusions:
Max: That actually turned out to be one of the coolest bills we’ve talked about, out of nowhere. That was so interesting actually.
Allie: I could have asked so many more questions! Just like about sleep in general
Anna: Yeah, she’s super super smart and she’s really plugged in. I’m glad that that was worth everybody’s time.
Relative to New Hampshire is a production of UNH Cooperative Extension, an equal opportunity educator and employer. All music is used by permission or by creative commons licensing. UNH Cooperative Extension is a non-partisan organization, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of the university, its trustees, or its volunteers. Inclusion or exclusion of commercial enterprises in this podcast does not equate endorsement. The University of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Counties, and the US Department of Agriculture cooperative to provide Extension programming in the Granite State. This podcast was made possible by the UNH Extension Internship program - if you’re interested in supporting great work like this for the future, learn more at www.extension.unh.edu/internships.
Music Credits: Briareus_Technicolor Dreams