The 11 pitfalls of health
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
The 11 pitfalls of health
Dear Dr Banchob
Dr Banchob Junhasavasdikul is a natural therapist. He is the founder of the Balavi Natural Health Centre, and can be reached at dr.banchob@balavi.com.
I am Caucasian living in Thailand. I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome with severe constipation. Your last article talked about drinking the right amount of water every day. But I’m wondering, what should be the size of a glass? I usually drink about 1,000ml of water a day. Does fruit juice, tea and coffee count also?
Also I’ve had sleeping problems. I’ve sometimes felt tired after waking up. Could you discuss a bit on sleeping?
L. Sullivan.
Dear L. Sullivan,
I had mentioned in my last article about “The First Pitfall of Health”, which was a misunderstanding about the amount of water ones should drink per day.
Normally one should drink not more than 1,000ml of water per day. One glass usually equals to 250ml. And this includes all kinds of beverage. About the question on constipation and irritable bowel, I already answered you personally.
Here we come to the second pitfall about sleeping. Ones may have misunderstanding about sleeping. They believe they can sleep at any hours as long as the hours are sufficient. That’s wrong!
There are two questions about sufficient sleeping. The first is for how long ones should sleep. The second is when they should sleep.
Sleeping was believed to occupy one-third of our life time. Sir Thomas More, an English philosopher, proposed eight hours for sleeping is healthy enough for a person. Since, that has been used as reference almost every where for sufficient sleeping period, although many people, including a few famous people, did sleep less than eight hours.
Pope John Paul II slept four hours a day. Napoleon Bonapart and Thomas Elva Edison slept less than four hours period. Therefore, Edison had to invent electric bulb giving him light during his waking hours.
In fact, scientists eventually conclude that the range of sleeping time in normal people are from 4.5 to 10 hours. Most people sleep at 6.5 to 8.5 hours. There are several factors involve, including age, nutritional status, occupation and such.
The physiology of neurotransmitters, melatonin and serotonin, changing as a cycle in 24 hours plays the major role.
Melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland. It not even triggers the feeling of sleepiness but also influence many more hormonal and immunological respond in our body. Newborn babies and children have higher level of melatonin, thus is the explanation why they sleep much more than adults.
Melatonin level starts to reduce to very low level when the ages grow. Therefore adult and elderly usually stay up late and some are suffered from sleeplessness.
Now, come to the question “when should we sleep.” Every creature has its own body structure to determine whether it should be nocturnal or diurnal creature. The owl, cat and bat are nocturnal because they have some special organs for them to hunt their preys in the darkness. In human being, we don’t have such organs, so we may be classified as diurnal creature.
Philosophers believed that we have the “third eye”. Yoga mentioned that anyone whose third eye opened will reach the state of body and mind unified, getting the universal wisdom. Scientist did prove this hypothesis by discovering that a salamander has a third eye”. It is a scale like organ at the middle of its forehead, whose function is a receptor for sun light. Early every morning, sun light will activate this third eye to secrete serotonin. On the contrary, darkness after sunset will trigger melatonin secretion from such organ and let it sleep.
Many thousands of years passed, by the process of evolution the scale like third eye in salamander grew deep into the skull and turned to be a pineal gland in human being. It still responds to light and darkness, secreting serotonin and melatonin in cycle as usual. We may call it as a biological clock.
In fact, the pineal gland responds to the light and darkness. In order to enhance normal pineal function one should sleep after sunset and wake up early morning, if we’d like to be healthy. Staying up late at night, even though with a sufficient period of time for a sleep, will not be refreshing like those who sleep and wake up synchronizely with the sun.
Nowadays, people living in the modern society disturb their own pineal glands by the electrical lamps, light refraction from televisions, computer screens and more. So there are more and more people suffered from functional diseases which include sleeplessness, easy to lose temper, thyrotoxicosis, irregular menstruation, fibrocystic breast, fibromyalgia, infertility, chronic fatigue syndrome, low immunity, auto-immune disease or even cancer.
Nurses, doctors, flight attendants are the foremost occupations that suffered. Others include youngster or computer addicts who lose their “time orientation” to the world of Internet.
Sleep at night and wake early morning is the healthy way of life. If you have no choice, yoga or qigong training, melatonin consumption and oral organo-peptide supplement with the pineal extract are the alternatives.
