Ok, maybe your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre - they slept twice. And so can you.

The history

The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn't always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between "first sleep" and "second sleep." Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her "firste sleep." And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.

The cholesterol-lowering medication Crestor (rosuvastatin) was the most prescribed medication in the United States during the last 12 months. As reported by Medscape Medical News in response to research completed by IMS Health.

Crestor topped the list of the most prescribed medications, with 23.7 million prescriptions. In terms of sales, Crestor was 5th on the list with total sales of 5.3 billion USD.

One of the reasons why Crestor has become so popular, is the JUPITER trial. In 2008, pharmaceutical companies and much of the world's media trumpeted the results of the JUPITER trial, which involved the use of Crestor for people with elevated levels of C-reactive Protein (a marker of systemic inflammation).

The results of the JUPITER trial are summarised below in the video excerpt from $TATIN NATION. An honest assessment of the published trial data shows that Crestor did not provide any meaningful benefit. That's before we even start to look at the adverse effects of Crestor, which included an increase in the risk for type 2 diabetes. However, the situation is even worse than we think.

People who think depression is a western malaise might be surprised by the results of a new study

For those who think of depression as a byproduct of the vapidity of western materialism, this latest study by researchers in Queensland might come as something of a shock. Depression simply isn't that picky. And when it comes to depressive disorders, parts of north Africa and the Middle East suffer more than North America and western Europe.

According to the researchers, who gathered pre-existing data on clinical diagnoses up to 2010, Algeria, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan fared worse for the cumulative number of years their citizens lived with the disability of depression (YLD). (For the Middle East countries, bear in mind that this relates to data gathered before the Arab spring turned lives upside down).


Japan fared the best, along with Australia and New Zealand. The researchers caveated their work by acknowledging that data is patchy from some parts of the world. Intriguingly, the UK and US - countries in which reporting on mental illness and cultural reflections of depression are rapidly multiplying - appear to be far less badly afflicted than parts of Africa and eastern Europe.

New research findings of WTC-CHEST Program at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai presented at the 2013 American Society of Nephrology Meeting during National Kidney Week.

For the first time, researchers have linked high levels of inhaled particulate matter by first responders at Ground Zero to kidney damage. Researchers from the WTC-CHEST Program, a subset of the World Trade Center Health Program Clinical Center for Excellence at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, presented their new findings at the 2013 American Society of Nephrology meeting on Nov. 9 during National Kidney Week.

After the 9/11 tragedy, first responders at Ground Zero were exposed to varying levels of a dust cloud of air filled with cement dust, smoke, glass fibers, and heavy metals. The WTC-CHEST Program at Mount Sinai has previously linked this particulate matter exposure to lung and heart abnormalities. However, its effects on the kidney health of first responders have never been explored until now.

Thirty-five people have now contracted measles in Queensland in one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in Queensland's recent history.

This year 30 of the 35 measles cases have emerged since August, with eight cases now confirmed at Woodford Correctional Centre.

Last year only four Queenslanders contracted measles.

Questions are being asked if the measles outbreak is linked to overcrowding in Queensland prisons.

The Department of Justice and Attorney General on Wednesday evening confirmed there were now 6432 prisoners in Queensland jails on November 6.

It is the first time in Queensland history prisoner numbers have been more than 6000.The extra 832 prisoners include hundreds "doubling up" in cells at several prisons in the Ipswich area.

Thousands of children are in ­danger of catching measles because their parents still refuse to let them have proper vaccinations.

Health chiefs have warned Britain is on the brink of a second major ­epidemic just four months after the previous outbreak which claimed one life and more than 1,200 victims.

The virus is highly contagious. Experts say one child with measles sitting in a classroom for just an hour will pass it on to at least 70 per cent of other pupils who are not vaccinated.

Cases have once again soared in Swansea, the area which was hit earlier this year.

Yet another fatal blow to American privacy and liberties.

In Hanna, Wyoming, the Obamacare RFID chips are currently being "test ran."

Over the last two weeks there has been legislation that has passed that mandates anyone who is receiving government welfare or any sort of government assistance, to get the RFID implant. It doesn't stop with welfare recipients though. This fascist invasion extends to all Police officers, military and even garbage men will be required to have the RFID chip by the end of next month or face termination from their jobs.

Tammy Josephine Laurence, a single mother of three, who is currently accepting housing assistance, was mandated to get the chip..this is what she had to say about it.

"Well, they said I better do this, or they was gonna cut the welfare. I'm a full time single mother. I got three young kids that need me at all hours and ain't no man to help. I didn't have no choice..."

The following is an excerpt from the new book, GRAIN BRAIN: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers by Dr. David Perlmutter (Little, Brown and Co., 2013).

Imagine being transported back to the Paleolithic era of early humans who lived in caves and roamed the savannas tens of thousands of years ago. Pretend, for a moment, that language is not a barrier and you can communicate easily. You have the opportunity to tell them what the future is like.

From a cross-legged perch on a dirt floor in front of a warm fire, you start by describing the wonders of our high-tech world, with its planes, trains, and automobiles, city skyscrapers, computers, televisions, smart phones, and the information highway that is the Internet. Humans have already traveled to the moon and back. At some point, the conversation moves to other lifestyle topics and what it's like to really live in the twenty-first century.

You dive into describing modern medicine with its stupendous array of drugs to treat problems and combat diseases and germs. Serious threats to survival are few and far between. Not many people need to worry about crouching tigers, famine, and pestilence. You explain what it's like to shop at grocery stores and supermarkets, a totally foreign concept to these individuals. Food is plentiful, and you mention things like cheeseburgers, French fries, soda, pizza, bagels, bread, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, waffles, scones, pasta, cake, chips, crackers, cereal, ice cream, and candy. You can eat fruit all year long and access virtually any kind of food at the touch of a button or short drive away. Water and juice come in bottles for transportability.

Recently, I've been hearing from many patients who have read Dr. Perlmutter's new book, Grain Brain, and are now concerned about their carb intake. In his book, Dr. Perlmutter suggests that dietary carbohydrates cause high blood sugar, inflammation, and other effects that lead to a "toxic brain," which can then develop into neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression, and others. Based on this line of causality, he recommends that everyone consume a very low carb diet (<60g per day) in order to prevent neurological disease.

First of all, I'd like to point out that very low carb (VLC) and ketogenic diets can be effective therapeutic tools for treating many neurological disorders. I touched on this briefly a while back in my podcast with Emily Deans, and initial studies on low-carb diets and mental health have shown promise. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Because Dr. Perlmutter is a neurologist, it makes sense that he would be a proponent of low-carb diets for his patients based on these therapeutic effects.

However, recommending a low-carb diet as an intervention for sick people is very different from promoting it as a preventative measure for the entire population, which is what Dr. Perlmutter does in Grain Brain. His approach would be somewhat akin to recommending that everyone go on the Autoimmune Protocol to prevent autoimmune disease, which would be unnecessarily restrictive and unhelpful.


It's important to realize that just because a low-carb diet can help treat neurological disorders, doesn't mean the carbs caused the disorder in the first place. While I don't argue with the idea that refined and processed carbs like flour and sugar contribute to modern disease, there's no evidence to suggest that unrefined, whole-food carbohydrates do. In fact, there are three compelling reasons why this is not the case.

Jet lag, shift work, and even late nights staring at your tablet or smartphone may be making you sick. That's because the body's internal clock is set for two 12-hour periods of light and darkness, and when this rhythm is thrown off, so is the immune system. One reason may be that the genes that set the body clock are intimately connected to certain immune cells, according to a new study.

The finding "was a happy accident," says Lora Hooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She and her colleagues were studying NFIL3, a protein that guides the development of certain immune cells and turns on the activity of others. The gene for this protein is mutated in some human patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and mice lacking the gene for NFIL3, the team found, had more so-called T_H17 cells in their intestines.

These cells are a type of immune cell known as a T cell. They get their name from a signal they produce, called interleukin 17, which tells other T cells to increase the immune response. In normal numbers, T_H17 cells, which live in the intestines, help the body fight bacterial and fungal infections.

But when there are too many, the immune defense begins to cause illness rather than prevent it. Boosting NFIL3 levels in T cells growing in lab cultures resulted in fewer of them turning into T_H17 cells, the researchers found, suggesting that the protein's job is to prevent T cells from going into that area of specialization. The absence of the protein, the team concluded, leads to runaway T_H17 activity.