Could the amount of sleep you get influence the amount of fat you carry? In two words: why not? Science News reports that it has, for some time, been no secret to epidemiologists that people who sleep less than 7 to 8
hours a night have elevated rates of obesity. That’s why Karine Spiegel of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago conducted a series of experiments that would eventually show that forced
sleep restriction for 2 days increased appetite and triggered changes
in the appetite-related hormones ghrelin and leptin. That ghrelin elevation and leptin suppression, they suspect, may make people want to eat.
The same stoory cites another new study in which Emmanuel Mignot of
Stanford University Medical School and his colleagues tested about
2,000 employees of Wisconsin government agencies. Mignot found that volunteers who slept either significantly less or
more than the overall average tended to be heavier than people getting
a moderate amount of sleep. Compared with people who
slept 8 hours a night, those who slept 5 hours had 16 percent lower
leptin concentrations and 15 percent higher ghrelin concentrations in
their blood. The Stanford researchers are now trying to learn whether extra sleep can make some obese people
lose weight. Mignot says he has reason to believe that an extra 1.5 hours of sleep per night
might produce weight losses of 3 to 4 percent.
Until he gets that down, Geezer will take no chances. Starting tomorrow, on National Nap Day, he will grap a few winks whenever they are within reach.
But the question they don’t address is, does being heavy disrupt your sleep?! (It makes people snore more, I’ve read, which might be disruptive. Hm, perhaps they should study the weight of spouses of snorers….) Well, good stuff and more ammunition in my ongoing fight with myself to get to bed earlier!
Sleeping too little can lead to increased weight?
SportGeezer has an interesting article examining whether people who sleep too little are more likely to suffer from problems with being overweight. The article refers to an original report at Science News.