Daylight Saving Time: History, health impacts and debate
· Toronto Sun
Most Canadians will be springing their clocks forward one hour this weekend.
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For some, that loss of 60 minutes will become permanent.
British Columbia announced earlier this week that the province is officially ending the twice-yearly time change in favour of an extra hour of evening sunlight.
That trade-off means an extended period of darkness in the morning.
Premier David Eby said the change is to improve people’s overall health and reduce disruptions for families.
But before considering the health impacts of Daylight Saving Time, we take a look at how setting the clocks came about.
History of time change
The history of Daylight Saving Time can trace its roots to New Zealand when entomologist George Hudson suggested in 1895 the idea of a two-hour time shift so that he could have more hours of evening sunlight in the summer.
Nothing came of that idea until the 1900s.
The first jurisdiction to enact the time change actually happened in Ontario.
In May 1908, Fort William and Port Arthur — which later merged to become Thunder Bay — were the first municipalities to adjust the time one hour ahead to match the eastern time zone.
“By 1910, they had both adopted eastern time, which was considered to be a permanent move to daylight saving time,” Christina Wakefield, a City of Thunder Bay Archives worker, told the Fort Frances Times two years ago.
The change was needed in the grain shipping industry to coordinate workers across time zones.
“Because the port workers in Thunder Bay were in one time zone and workers coming in on a ship or train were in the Toronto time zone, they ended up having essentially two hours of lunch where nobody was doing any work,” Wakefield said.
A few years later, in 1915, Germany began thinking of ideas to conserve energy while the First World War was raging across Europe.
The German government decided to have more daylight hours beginning in the spring in an effort to conserve scarce resources like fossil fuels.
In Canada, the federal government regulated the hour shifts in 1918 to increase production during the war, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia .
When the Second World War broke out, the Canadian government implemented Daylight Saving Time all year round.
Since 1987, provincial, territorial and municipal governments in Canada have regulated official time zones.
Health impacts
There has been lots of research and discussion over the health impacts of moving the clocks forward in the spring and back an hour in the fall.
According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), there are serious health concerns associated with losing and gaining an hour of sleep.
“An abundance of accumulated evidence indicates that the acute transition from standard time to Daylight Saving Time incurs significant public health and safety risks,” the group wrote in a position paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2020.
“It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favour of a fixed, national, year-round Standard Time.”
One study found making Standard Time permanent would lead to 2.6 million fewer people with obesity
In 2018, a paper in the Internal and Emergency Medicine journal noted a nearly one-third increase (29%) in heart attacks following the springtime hour switch.
Not only does time changes mess with people’s health, it also affect the circadian rhythms in humans when the body is required to wake up an hour earlier.
“We’re changing the clocks but we’re not changing the signals our body aligns to,” Dr. Karin Johnson, professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine-Baystate, told Time magazine .
Present day debate
There is debate on whether Standard Time stays uninterrupted, Daylight Saving Time becomes permanent, or whether the biannual time shifts continue.
A Calgary researcher said keeping Standard Time would be best as the sun is at its highest point during the noon hour.
“We have a little structure in our brain that keeps track of time — keeps track of daylight in our environment — and organizes all the rhythms in our body,” Dr. Michael Antle, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Calgary, told the Calgary Herald .
“The big one is sleep-wake, and that’s the one we’re going to mess with this weekend when we change our clocks. But everything else that we do, all the hormones in your body, have a circadian rhythm … There’s a clock in all of our organs, so in our heart, our liver, our digestive tract.”
He said making Daylight Saving Time permanent would be the last option for human health, arguing that people would be waking up to darkness for months on end.
In addition, seasonal depression would get worse and people will be less productive, he said.
“This is why this one time change affects people so much more than just having a bad night’s sleep,” Antle said. “You have a bad night’s sleep tonight, you’e gonna go to bed early tonight or you might sleep in tomorrow. You’ll make up for that one hour and you’ll feel better.
“But it’ not just losing that one hour — and that’s an abrupt change, it’s hard — it’s that every morning for 27 days, you’re going to be forced out of bed earlier than your brain and your body wants.”