Healthy Living : Insufficient sleep associated with overweight and obesity

Which came first — weight gain or not sleeping as much as needed?

In normal-weight college students, blood sugar abnormalities occurred by allowing them only five hours of sleep each night for one week. Sleep deprivation alters hormones and increases appetite, according to the results of a brief randomized study published in the Dec. 7, 2004, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. The editorialists suggest that getting enough sleep may help reduce weight gain.

Obese and overweight patients in a study group reported sleeping less than their peers with normal body mass indexes (BMIs), according to an article in the January 10, 2004, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Insufficient sleep causes changes such as excessive daytime sleepiness, altered mood, and increased risk for work-related injury and automotive accidents, according to background information in the article. It has been reported that the average American is currently getting less sleep than they did a century ago. With these declining sleep times there has also been an increase in the number of both obese and severely obese people in the US.

Dr. Robert D. Verona’s study found that total sleep time decreased as BMI increased, except in the severely obese group. Men slept an average of 27 minutes less than women, and overweight and obese patients slept less than patients with normal BMIs. The difference in total sleep time between patients with a normal BMI and the other patients was 16 minutes per day, reaching 112 minutes, or 1.86 hours, over a week. In addition, night-shift work was associated with 42 minutes less total sleep time.

“Americans experience insufficient sleep and corpulent bodies. Clinicians are aware of the burden of obesity on patients,” the reserachers write. “Our findings suggest that major extensions of sleep time may not be necessary, as an extra 20 minutes of sleep per night seems to be associated with a lower BMI. We caution that this study does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between restricted sleep and obesity. Investigations demonstrating success in weight loss via extensions of sleep would help greatly to establish such a relationship.”

From these studies, we might add sleep duration to the environmental factors that are prevalent in our society and that contribute to weight gain and obesity,” the authors write. “Although recommendations to get both a better night’s sleep and more exercise might superficially seem to be at odds with each other from the perspective of energy expenditure and energy balance, these simple goals may well become a part of our future approach to combating obesity.”

Bottom line? Get enough sleep, before you become overweight or obese!

Please e-mail me with your suggestions, questions, and comments on healthy living at [email protected]. Please remember to always check with your physician before incorporating any changes in exercise or diet.