The Great Clock Debate

**Doug Pike** (0:01)
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**Doug Pike** (0:47)
newpromiseneuropathy.com. And now Fifty Plus with Doug Pike. All right, here we go again. Welcome to all of you who are joining me on this Wednesday afternoon. And right up front here in this first segment, I wanted to talk about the talk that's underway and what probably will happen with daylight saving time. I actually would be fine with being on daylight saving time all year round and for quite a few reasons that I think are all pretty legitimate. Making that one simple change would do an awful lot to help our whole country, really, if you stop and think about it. The most compelling argument for permanent daylight saving time is public safety. Darkness is a danger for driving, for walking, for being out, just at all. And the evening rush hour is consistently deadlier than the morning equivalent. More drivers on the road, visibility drops, fatigue sets in at the end of the workday.
And by extending evening daylight, we just really do increase road safety and significantly, I think, reduce fatal vehicle on pedestrian crashes. That extra hour of sunlight allows for extended outdoor recreation for families and kids, too. And I'm a perfect example of that. I can't wait for daylight saving time, because that means after I get off work, even if I get off work a little late, I can still go play a little golf, I can still go fishing, I can still do a lot of things outdoors that I can't do when it's pitch dark. There's a lot to be said also for the, just the mental health aspects of a little more sunlight in the day. A whole lot of people in this country experience what they call up north the winter blues as daylight hours shrink. And under the current system, standard time plunges into, it sends us into darkness like 4.35 o'clock in the evening. It's a very unnatural and depressing and premature end to an active day. If we switch to year round daylight saving time, that's going to give us sunsets after 6 p.m. even in December. And that one little hour gives us all kinds of opportunities for exercise, socializing, going fishing and playing golf, all of that stuff after work or school. People are a whole lot more likely to get outside and move around when the day doesn't feel like it's already ended before dinner. That same shift boosts our economy too. The Chamber of Commerce has supported extended evening daylight because it encourages consumers to participate in outdoor activities, dine out, go to sporting events and shop and do all of that stuff. And this support has been there since 1915 You'd think we would have had it figured out by now, but we don't. And finally, we can look at just the chaos of this clock change every year, twice a year. One time you're springing forward, and that causes all kinds of spikes in heart attack, strokes and motor vehicle accidents due to sleep deprivation. If we set the clocks so that it gets dark one hour later every day of every year, that's not going to be an issue anymore. Really do like the idea of consistent, predictable days and just being able to match our social routines with the natural light that we all need anyway. I don't lose any sleep when we flip the clocks one way or the other, that doesn't bother me at all. But I really do like the idea of having an extra hour of daylight to go do some of the things that I truly like to do. The only real downside I see to this is that the kids, the younger children, the kids who ride the school buses and all, will have to be at that bus stop a lot earlier, and that means they're going to be in the dark.
I wish we could have more daylight hours or maybe change the hours of school to coincide a little bit more easily with daylight saving time, or with whatever time they call it after they change it. But that wouldn't be a bad idea really to go ahead and just shift the time that school starts forward an hour so that the kids don't have to stand out there in the dark. For a lot of them, that's got to be pretty scary. Now, I want to go ahead and I want to shift over to something that I hope I can cover in just a few minutes. And I'm pretty sure I can. And that is the story that I saw a while back about how people who wear sunscreen a lot, the people who wear sunscreen most often also tend to be the most likely to develop skin cancers right up front. That seems pretty counterintuitive, but there's a reason that the results of this long term research are what they are. For starters, the people more likely to use sunscreens also are more likely to need it. This is going to be fair skinned people with more sensitivity to the sunlight. And concurrently, the same people, while they're out in the sun, most of those people in that category also tend to forget to reapply sunscreen as directed, and then forget about it, because that flat doesn't work. I don't think any sunscreen will stay on you all day long unless you just bring out an entire tube of zinc oxide and paint your face with it. Just based on that simple fact that the people most likely to need sunscreen are also the people most likely to wear sunscreen, which then makes it logical that the people who need it and wear it would get the most skin cancers too because they're not wearing it the way they're supposed to. They don't reapply as directed. On the plus side for wearing sunscreen is the fact that it really does prevent DNA damage from the ultraviolet rays that are the primary driver of skin cancers, including basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma, all three. You don't want any of those. Some worse than others, but they're all skin cancers.