For example, I followed several of the citations that the position paper claims to show that daylight savings time changes cause measurable negative health effects. Koopman et al showed that social jet lag is associated with higher diabetes rates. This is people who change sleep patterns by more than 2 hours every week. It’s pure unsupported assumption to imply that the switch to daylight savings time twice a year shares these effects. Same goes for Haraszti. Hafner et al studied problems of lack of enough sleep in general, there is no connection to the twice yearly time change.
It only takes a few of these to start smelling agenda, and see clearly that the “plenty of footnotes” pile of evidence is being made to appear larger than it really is. I don’t really get why though. I’d be happy not switching times, but I have good reason now to be skeptical of this research’s claims that there are large measurable differences between settling on standard vs daylight time. Why are you sure that standard time is somehow better, and what does it mean to you?
Pretty much no one is sleeping properly anyway and we're all dying early from lifestyle related illness.
More daylight ours to get fuck-eyed I say.
There's been plenty of research on this and Standard ("Winter") Time is best for humans. A peer-reviewed paper with plenty of footnotes if you want to dig into the details / weeds:
> Conclusion
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
[…]
> Summary
> Discrepancies and misalignments between social (local) clock time, sun clock time, and body clock time can be caused by political decisions: DST is one example. There are multiple health and safety consequences of these misalignments. Our goal is that this article’s facts and reasoning will be used to make clock choices that improve human lives.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
They explicitly state that always-DST is worse than the current switching regime.
Various societies of chronobiologists recommend getting rid of DST completely:
> The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST.
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/askscien...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
If we're going to go through the drama of making this change (and some of us had to live through the 'Bush' DST change), then biologically speaking, the best current research says Standard Time is the way to go.