Source: Speak Up
Language level: Advanced
Speaker: Just Ratcliffe
Standard: British
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
It is well known that If you want to stay healthy and live long, then you should eat well, take regular exercise, reduce your consumption of alcohol, and eliminate smoking altogether. What is less well known is that you should also get plenty of sleep. Science is beginning to take sleep seriously. For example, the University of Warwick in England now runs a special interdisciplinary research group on Sleep. Health and Society it is headed by Francesco Cappucio, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Epidemiology. He says that, when it comes to sleep, we are in trouble.
Francesco Cappuccio
(Italian accent)
Our society is going through a process of a steady decline in the number of hours that people sleep. Now, I don’t have to tell you, your grandfather used to sleep probably nine hours per night: you hardly sleep six hours per night, or seven hours per night. If you look at the statistics, in large populations, from the early 1900s to now, in the States, the average duration that people sleep has gone down by nearly three hours.
Professor Cappuccio says that factors include our “24/7” society and the “Edison Disease,” which refers to the elects on our sleeping habits caused by the advent of electricity and artificial lighting. A number of scientific papers have been prepared on the dangerous medical consequences of sleep reduction:
Francesco Cappuccio
This paper is one of a series of papers where we have looked in a similar way also at the link between duration of sleep and other conditions like cardiovascular disease –so deaths from strokes and heart attacks – but also, for instance, the incidence, to the occurrence of new cases of Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, and we found very consistently, that short sleepers have an increased risk of all these conditions.
DISASTROUS…
And it’s not only a question of health Shift work, i.e. working at night, and the resulting sleep deprivation has caused a number of disastrous accidents:
Francesco Cappuccio:
Some of the most famous national and international disasters have had implications of somebody make (sic) an error whilst they were on shift. For instance, do you remember the space shuttle disaster, when it blew up? Well, that was due to some error made by somebody, a mechanical error shift they were on that shift. The Bhopal chemical disaster, Chermobyl, the Exxon Valdez incident, when the oil spillage of the tanker hit –the guy fell asleep whilst he was maneuvering.
