Twice a year, Americans grumble about the inconvenience and sleep disruption of seasonal time changes, but there’s more to our grudge against springing forward and falling back. New evidence shows we’d all be a little less prone to obesity and strokes if we ditched the switch, according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The reductions from simply sticking to standard time would be modest: a little less than 1 percent on average for obesity and less than one-tenth of a percent for strokes.

“If you look at the actual increased risk” of one person gaining or losing an hour of sleep, the stakes are small, said Jamie M. Zeitzer, one of the study’s authors and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine.

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