>From OUTSIDE MAGAZINE February 1993 p93

JET LAG's FINAL HOUR
There is a solution for the time traveller. But is it worth the trouble?
By Mark Jannot

   You've probably experienced the long Saturday night leading to the
bleary-eyed Sunday, with the late-morning ceremonial stagger to the
shower and an afternoon spent balancing a headache on wobbly shoulders.
A hangover? Wrong. Jet lag.

  Or maybe not. But it's some consolation to think it could be. After
all, if you're usually in bed from 11 to seven but come home from the
pub at three and get up eight hours later, that's a four hour shift in
schedule. As far as your body and its internal clock are concerned, this
presents the same problem as if you'd flown to Honolulu on Saturday
night: You've gained a lot of hours. You'll suffer on Sunday night --
you're back in bed by 11, but your body now has a hard time shutting
down at what it perceives to be early evening -- and on Monday and for
a few more days you'll feel a lag. Jet lag without the jet.

  This, then, is what jet lag is: the desynchronization of internal and
external clocks. Fly, say, from New York to Paris and you've got to
reset your internal clock by six hours; your body expects to be hitting
the sack just as the alarm clock rings. No one knows this struggle
better than adventure-travel trip leaders, international commuters who
have to be trekking, paddling, or climbing within a day or two of flying
halfway around the world. Not to mention negotiating with heads of
state. "I was setting up our Zambezi operation back in 1981 and flew
directly to Zambia," says Sobek founder Richard Bangs, introducing his
worst jet lag horror story. "I had a meeting with President Kaunda about
the expedition, which he was going to launch. I was swept straight from
the plane to his office, and as I was sitting there talking to him I
felt a wave come over me and could no longer stay awake. The president
went off to talk with some ministers, and when he came back I was sound
asleep in his office. I think I was snoring."

  The good news for Bangs, and for that matter anyone who travels, is
that there are solutions -- ways to prevent jet lag, or at least to
recover from it quickly. The bad news is that until a miracle pill hits
the market (see sidebar) the most reliable anti-jet-lag methods are so
regimented that even most professional globe-trotters don't bother with
them.

  Take Bangs, who flies overseas about ten times a year. He tries to
sleep on the flight, going so far as to fly on Christmas and other low
traffic days when he can lie across five seats on an empty airplane. He
drinks lots of water to replenish the fluids sapped from his body by the
parched cabin air. He takes a quick run after the flight to invigorate
his blood with added oxygen. And he resets his watch to his
destination's time and stays up until the new bedtime -- all good
strategies.

  Yet Bangs still suffers. The really effective methods for fighting jet
lag take everything he does and add a few crucial variables like
exposure to light, caffeine use, and strict feast-fast diets. Then
everything is codified into a rigid schedule. The idea is to use certain
cues to quickly reset the internal clock, which runs according to a
circadian rhythm that ebbs and flows inside each of us. Circadian
rhythms -- the word comes from the Latin meaning "approximately a day" -
- are our patterns of waking and sleeping, activity and inactivity,
hunger and satiation. Oddly enough, in almost everyone this daily cycle
takes almost 25 hours. Every day we use environmental and social cues,
like sunlight or the mandate to be at work on time, to set it back an
hour. This is why most people find it less taxing to fly west than east:
Your internal clock has a built in hour lag already, so it's easier to
gain hours in the day than lose them.

THE PRESCRIPTION

 THE DEAN OF JET-LAG THEORISTS IS Charles Ehret, a chronobiologist
recently retired from Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago who
has been studying circadian rhythms for decades, beginning in the 1940s
with work on the sexuality of protozoa. (They do it only during the
day.) So many years of concentration on one area of study have
encouraged in him something of a missionary zeal. Ehret has designed a
special diet and helped create computer software in the battle against
jet lag and even argues that "circadian education" should be mandatory
in the schools. In a culture that consigns a third of its members to
shift work, he says, the social benefits are obvious. "From that point
of view," Ehret says, "it's like driver ed."

  According to Ehret, the secret to dealing with jet lag is to get a
handle on the zeitgebers (German for "time givers"), cues that can be
used to reset our circadian clocks. Ehret cites six zeitgebers, which
must be co-ordinated correctly depending on the number of time zones
crossed and the direction of travel. To start, reset your watch to
destination time when you board the plane and begin arranging your
routines as you will at your destination. If you're Paris bound, sleep
(or rest, anyway) when the Parisians are sleeping; eat breakfast when
they're having their morning brioche. And incorporate these cues at the
right times:

  Meals.
Every morning, just before your alarm clock rings, the body's enzymes
and hormones start beating a path toward their proper targets and not
incidentally waking you up. As the day goes on, another pathway in the
brain opens, sending out the chemicals tryptophan, serotonin, and
melatonin, eventually putting you to sleep. Certain types of food help
keep each lane open: Proteins trigger the enzymes and hormones,
carbohydrates trigger the sleep inducing chemicals. So steak and eggs
(or yogurt or tofo) at breakfast time at your destination tells your
body that a new circadian cycle is beginning, and spaghetti with
marinara 12 hours later helps shut it down. If the airline is going to
serve a carbohydrate-filled continental breakfast, arrange for the
flight attendant to save you the previous night's chicken dinner so you
can get your fill of protein at the right time (unfortunately, most
airlines work on the timetable of your origin).

Caffeine.
The caffeine in coffee or tea, and the theobromine in cocoa, will pull
the circadian clock forward or push it back, depending on what time
they're taken. Drunk between 8 and 11 A.M., they slow the clock down,
which is what you want when flying west. Taken between 6 and 11 P.M.,
they speed it up (once you recover from the initial caffeine boost,
drinking coffee at night makes your body shut down earlier). Drink 3 to
4:30 P.M. -- right around British tea time.

Cycles of feasting and fasting.
The Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet that Ehret developed is employed over the
course of five days leading up to the flight. Eat heavily one day and
lightly the next for four days (proteins for breakfast and lunch,
carbohydrates for dinner), ending with a fast on the day of the flight.
This depletes glycogen stored in the liver and leaves the body far more
sensitive to the other cues.

Daylight.
Morning light hitting the retina is one of the strongest indications to
the brain that a new cycle has begun. So eastbound travelers should try
to arrive in the morning (destination time) to get accustomed to an
earlier schedule, and westbound travelers should land in the late
afternoon, because dwindling light pulls the clock forward.
Unfortunately, this gets trickier when you're traversing more than six
time zones. "If you go from Oregon to Holland, nine time zones east,
dawn in Holland is now falling on your Oregon evening," says Alfred J.
Lewy, who studies the effects of jet lag at Oregon Health Sciences
University in Portland. "You haven't adjusted your clock yet, so it
thinks that's light in the evening." In such a situation, it's best to
hedge your bets and get light in the middle of the day. Wear sunglasses
the rest of the time.

Socializing.
Your mind is generally intellectually active only during the day, and
your internal clock knows it. Sharing family histories with your
seatmate at 2 A.M. destination time is a no-no.

Exercise.
The research on humans hasn't been done yet to support this as a
zeitgeber, but the conventional wisdom is that some kind of aerobic
exercise at the beginning of the day, destination time, is another cue
that the active phase of the cycle has begun. It's tough to go for a run
on the aircraft, but at least walk to the rear of the plane and do some
stretching and isometric exercises while watching the sunrise over the
Atlantic. Then go back and eat last night's beef teriyaki.

   Ehret is adamant that each of these cues is important and that all
should be used together for best effect. "If you have all the zeitgebers
correct but you have a bull session at three in the morning," he says,
"that's going to screw the whole thing up.  Of course, what with travel
plans to finalize, last-minute chores, in-flight movies to watch, and
sights to see on arrival, who's going to remember when to eat pork chops
and when to drink latte? It all comes down to whether you want to suffer
before you touch down (employing all the zeitgebers) or upon arrival
(ignoring them), at which point your body will need approximately one
day to adjust for each time zone crossed. As for Bangs, he'll continue
to take his chances. "I tell you, I think flying is fun," he says. "I
like long flights, and I think it's just not worth depriving myself of
a drink or a meal -- if it's decent meal."

      Mark Jannot wrote about the best expeditions of the last 15 years
for the October 1992 Issue

                     FEBRUARY 1993 . OUTSIDE
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