How to Prevent Jet Lag

Anyone who has ever taken the red-eye from New York to Los Angeles knows that lethargic feeling that washes over you after 20 hours awake and a couple of drinks as you gamely try to make conversation at dinner. The feeling intensifies until you begin to babble incoherently and your host wonders if you are on some kind of medication. Mercifully, dinner ends just as you are about to go nose-down into your creme brulée. You stumble back to your hotel room, grateful your body will receive an extra three hours' sleep. You slog through the rest of the trip and start to feel fine by the time you leave. Yet when you return home you can't get to sleep and wake up tired and grouchy.

Transcontinental travel is even worse. Besides causing fatigue, major jet lag impairs your memory, disrupts cognitive processes, and interferes with motor functions. Some researchers even believe it shrinks your brain. If long-distance air travel is on your docket, get acquainted with some ways to prevent jet lag Jet lag is caused by rapid crossings of time zones that discombobulate your circadian clock. Symptoms include lethargy, fatigue, mental fogginess, disorientation, headaches, and moodiness, (in short, just about everything associated with getting old except constipation and thinning hair). Jet lag has been blamed for accidents, faulty negotiations, and poor athletic performance. Champion diver Greg Louganis cited jet lag as the reason why he bonked his head on the diving platform at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Symptoms of jet lag are exacerbated by traveling in a sealed metal tube filled with stale air. Due to cabin pressurization, the humidity on an airplane is typically very low (less than 10 percent), and after a couple of hours you will start to dry out. Drink plenty of liquids, especially water, and stay away from those little bottles of Drambuie they ply you with on overseas flights. Alcohol is the last thing you should put in a dehydrated body. Indigestible food served at bizarre hours (like dinner at midnight followed by "breakfast" at 3 a.m.), is no real benefit either. Your body will thank you if you have a light meal before the flight and pass up the junk they serve you on the plane.

Besides eating ahead of time, you may want to alter what you eat as well. Researchers believe that food is used by the body to set its internal clock. Dr. Charles F. Ehret, senior scientist emeritus of the Argonne National Laboratory, spent 40 years developing a scientific four-day diet that he claims comes close to eliminating jet lag. (Ehret now offers a customized jet lag prevention program based upon his research at Argonne through his company, StopJetLag Travel Service.) Follow this closely now: The first day of the diet calls for a high-protein breakfast and lunch, followed by a high-carbohydrate dinner and dessert; the second day, you are supposed to get by on soups, salads, fruits, and fruit juice; the third day is a repeat of the first; the fourth day is a repeat of the second. You can only have caffeine between 3 and 5 p.m. on days one, two, and three, and cannot have caffeine until the evening on the fourth day. Got it? (We're not sure if this diet really cures jet lag, but you will probably lose a couple of pounds.)