Twice a year, we “spring forward” into groggy zombie mode and “fall back” into bonus-snooze bliss, but new Stanford sleuthing reveals daylight saving time isn’t just a mild annoyance—it’s a sneaky saboteur fattening waistlines and spiking strokes like a villainous barista spiking your latte with lard. Forget the immediate fallout of heart attacks and fender-benders post-clock-tweak; this biannual body-clock betrayal is linked to long-haul havoc, with models crunching county data to predict that ditching the flip-flop for permanent standard time could zap 300,000 strokes and shrink obesity by 2.6 million nationwide. Blame the circadian chaos: shoving sunlight into “wrong” hours weakens our internal tick-tock, misaligning immune boosts, energy dips, and everything downstream, as behavioral whiz Jamie Zeitzer explains—it’s like jet lag on repeat, courtesy of Ben Franklin’s bad idea. The “spring ahead” hits hardest, jacking acute risks, while “fall back” feels like a freebie (until the winter blues creep in). Heavy hitters like the American Medical Association and Sleep Medicine Academy are chanting “end it now!” for standard time supremacy, but these projections skip weather whims and human quirks, leaving room for more digs. Still, in a nation already battling couch-potato epidemics, who knew fiddling with clocks was the real fat-cat culprit? It’s the ultimate time heist: robbing us of Z’s while padding our stats—proving the only thing saving daylight might be scrapping it altogether. Next spring, when you’re yawning through your alarm, blame the policy, not the pillow.
Daylight Saving Could Be Harming The Health of Millions of Americans
