Snacking is something school students indulged in. It is a guilt-laden habit which disturbs individuals of all ages, especially those who struggle with their weight.
So what might donate to the impulse for fries and biscuits after dinner? A new study indicates it may be sleep deprivation. Even if research participants were permitted to catch up on sleep over the weekend, the cravings dropped.
For the newspaper, published in February in the journal Current Biology, researchers utilised a deliciously rigorous research design to tease out the health ramifications of not sleeping and if sleeping too small during the week may be offset by a lazy weekend lie-in. (Hat tip to Dr Perry Wilson in Medscape, who brought it to our attention.)
They shot 36 healthy volunteers and restricted them to a laboratory for two weeks.
They had everybody sleep nine hours each night. They then randomly assigned the research participants into one of 3 classes: a”sleep restriction” group which was permitted to sleep only five hours each night; a management group that had the chance to relax a lavish nine hours each night; along with a”sleep recovery” group which got only five hours a night for five nights followed by a weekend sleep-in, and 2 nights of sleep restriction.
The researchers gathered information on how much each player slept and ate, in addition to monitoring their insulin sensitivity — or just how much of this hormone that the body required to secrete to handle glucose levels. They also observed the participants’ levels of melatonin, another hormone that indicates the body clock’s biological day and night.
So what is it about not sleeping enough that encourages snacking and weight gain?
There are a few potential explanations for why sleep-deprived folks gain weight more quickly. One has to do with metabolism. Before we get into the details, a quick recap on the three main ways our bodies metabolise energy. We’ve got the “basal metabolic rate” — or how you expend energy when you’re resting. There’s energy expenditure from physical activity. And there’s “diet-induced thermogenesis,” the amount of energy your body uses to digest and absorb calories in food. That last one accounts for about 10 per cent of the body’s overall energy expenditure.
Researchers have looked at whether people expend more energy processing a meal later in the day versus earlier and find that, independent of physical activity, the body uses less energy to digest food late in the day. So that means we may convert more calories to fat, instead of burning them off, when we eat late at night.
Researchers have also repeatedly found that when we’re tired — surprise, surprise — we eat more. In a meta-analysis of 11 studies, the authors showed that people ate 385 extra calories following a night of sleep deprivation. That’s about the same amount as a serving of Häagen-Dazs peanut butter ice cream a day.
There’s a hormone hypothesis to explain this tendency:
A lack of sleep hampers our hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin, potentially contributing to an increase in appetite. Sleep loss may also change how our brains perceive food, Vox’s Brian Resnick has explained. A lack of sleep seems to alter our food-reward system, causing us to get more excited by the cupcake or french fries than we would if we were well-rested.
Besides weight gain, another important finding is that late-night eating is associated with a higher risk of diabetes. Researchers have shown that the body has a harder time managing glucose at night. And the reason is that the circadian system — the body’s internal clock, which is running in every single cell — seems to regulate how the organisation manages calories at different times of the day.
“What we’ve discovered is that in case you consume the same meal in the daytime or day, the sugar response is relatively diminished in the day when compared with this afternoon,” Dr. Frank Scheer, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told Vox previously. “In the day hours, we can not deal with all the sugar load too.”
So, not only do we do worse at managing calories when we’re fatigued and may more often eat late at night, but we tend to eat more calories too.
Too many Americans are sleep-deprived
While the official recommendation from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is at least seven hours per night for adults, a third of Americans report sleeping less than that, on average.
So how can we get more sleep? First, get your basic sleep hygiene in check: Avoid caffeine after lunch, exercise regularly but not too late in the day, and avoid alcohol and heavy meals before bed.
And, for the love of God, get screens out of your bedroom. “If it’s possible to keep sleep equilibrium, that usually means you see the same light in precisely the same time daily, and the body will pick up on this,” the author of Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night’s Rest, Henry Nicholls, told Vox’s, Sean Illing. “And yeah, most individuals don’t appreciate how tumultuous artificial lighting is to the mind. It confuses your mind into believing it is daytime when it is bedtime” We know that is the last thing we would like to do if we are attempting to eliminate weight.
You might want to read Different Kinds of Sleep Problem
