"What's wrong with taking that sunlight in the AM when it's useless and just putting it at the end of the day when I can use it better?"

So which is it? Is the sunlight at that hour waking you up or is it wasted? Multiple studies show that gradual increasing daylight at that hour before one wakes up, actually improves, cognition, strength, and well-being. But all these people who are talking have absolutely no knowledge of these studies and most are not interested in finding out about them either. Even fewer understand that the impetus for DST is coming from the retail lobby who have studies that show credit card transactions go up significantly during DST and drop after it is done.

With respect, popularity is a remarkably poor standard for determining public-health policy. Cigarettes were once overwhelmingly popular. Sugary drinks, ultraprocessed food, excessive screen time, and chronic sleep deprivation remain popular. Popularity tells us what people enjoy—not what is biologically healthy. The human circadian system does not take opinion polls. Permanent daylight saving time does not create one additional minute of daylight. It merely relabels the existing daylight—taking an hour from the morning and moving it to the evening clock. That may feel pleasant after work, but morning light is the strongest environmental signal for advancing and stabilizing our circadian clock, while evening light pushes that clock later. Permanent DST would therefore mean darker winter mornings, more children traveling to school before sunrise, and more adults awakening and commuting before receiving the most important circadian light signal of the day. The American data are quite revealing. A 2019 study in the Journal of Health Economics compared communities on opposite sides of U.S. time-zone borders. People living on the side with later sunsets averaged approximately 19 minutes less sleep per night, were more likely to report insufficient sleep, and had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer. Because neighboring communities were compared across time-zone boundaries, this was substantially stronger evidence than simply comparing distant parts of the country. A separate U.S. analysis examined approximately four million cancer diagnoses in 607 counties across 11 states. After adjusting for latitude, poverty, smoking, and state, overall and several specific cancer rates generally increased from the eastern toward the western portions of time zones—the direction associated with later morning light and later sunsets. This was ecological evidence and cannot prove that clock time caused the cancers, but it is hardly reassuring. A 2023 national study also found significantly higher suicide rates in western portions of U.S. time zones than in corresponding eastern portions. Again, this does not prove individual causation, but it adds to the remarkably consistent pattern linking later clock-timed daylight with circadian disruption and adverse health outcomes. Most recently, Stanford researchers modeled light exposure and circadian burden county by county using American health data. Compared with continuing to change the clocks, permanent standard time was projected to result in approximately 2.6 million fewer Americans with obesity and 300,000 fewer people having experienced a stroke. Permanent DST was also better than changing the clocks twice yearly—but produced only about two-thirds of the modeled benefit of permanent standard time. In other words, even when the clock-changing problem is removed, standard time still performs better than daylight time for population health. The authors appropriately describe these as modeled estimates, not guaranteed outcomes, but the direction of the evidence is clear. Yes, we should stop changing the clocks twice a year. But eliminating the acute disruption by adopting permanent DST would simply institutionalize a chronic one-hour displacement from solar time. That is why the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Medical Association, the Sleep Research Society, the National Sleep Foundation, and numerous circadian scientists support permanent standard time rather than permanent DST. I completely understand why people enjoy brighter summer evenings. I do too. But personal preference at 7:00 p.m. should not outweigh population health at 7:00 a.m. Schools, businesses, and communities are perfectly capable of adjusting their schedules seasonally when later activities are desirable. We should adjust our schedules to the sun—not permanently falsify the clock and expect human biology to follow along.