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Every progress made by mankind in terms of technology and development is hailed as another step towards making life on earth comfortable. However, the irony is all these advances have only served to take away sleep from a huge proportion of the earth's population.

An increasing number of men and women are spending the time between getting up from bed and crashing back into it in a whir. And those intervals between getting up and going to sleep are growing longer and longer. Everywhere there is a mad rush to avoid being left out. From reaching your office, dropping kids at school, shopping at the local grocery store, every simple task leaves us stressed out and tired.

A recent study shows that most adults compromise on their sleep time. This may be due to hectic work schedules or simply because sleep eludes them. A poll held recently showed that only 50 per cent of Americans were getting the sleep they needed.

Many people take the easy way out -- pop a sleeping pill. Sleeping pills are okay if you are unwell and your doctor has advised them. Taking them is also okay if they help you through a traumatic period in your life, like the loss of a loved one. But if your sleep is totally depended on sleeping pills and sleeping disorders are constantly troubling you, alarm bells should start ringing.

It is indisputable that the modern way of life leads to sleep loss. Never-ending deadlines, the stresses of a competitive life, long-distance travel and jet lag, almost everything that we are forced to do by circumstances in the modern life lead to sleep loss and sleep disorders.

Add to that the environmental factors ' the rising noise levels, the rising toxicity, the rising background radiation... We don't give our bodies any reason not to be stressed!

The fact is a healthy body with no stress will have no problem relaxing and falling asleep. Since we cannot avoid the sleep-depriving factors around us, all we can do is learn to combat them.

That is where a group of wonder sugars that have only recently come to scientists' attention can help. These wonder sugars, called glyconutrients, are a group of plant sugars. Glyconutrients are essential for the cell-to-cell communication. And they play an important role in modulating our response to stress.

Glyconutrients attach themselves to the proteins and the lipids on the cell walls in a process is called glycosylation. This process is seen to be drastically altered under different types of stress, such as illness, accidents, and other mental trauma. In times of stress the level of glycoforms increased significantly to help in the restoration of normal cell function and help manage stress. The correlation between glyconutrients and stress is very clear here.

The problem is stress also makes the complex process for synthesizing glyconutrients in the human body to go awry. Simply put, the stressed out body cannot get the requisite quantity of glyconutrients. Which is why taking glyconutritionals or glyconutrient supplements regularly is necessary to combat stress and sleep loss.