Overweight, Diabetes and Sleep

Lack of Sleep and Gaining Weight

Joe Cannon, MS
www.Joe-Cannon.com

By now, just about everybody has heard that not getting enough sleep might cause us to gain weight. This, in turn, might result in more health problems. A few facts about lack of sleep and health:

• Americans today sleep about 80 fewer minutes per night than they did in 1950.

• Research suggests that people who sleep less than 5 hours a night are more prone to getting diabetes.

• People who sleep less than 7 hours a night tend to have higher BMI’s (Body Mass Index) which generally is associated with more health problems like heart disease, diabetes and the complications from these disorders.

The reasons for the apparent connection between lack of sleep and health problems are springing up all over the place and some gurus have even written books touting to have the answer. Some of these answers are quite complicated and include altered sugar metabolism and issues having to do with how the brain works. No need to go into those issues here.

I have often wondered however if there might be an easier explanation as to why lack of sleep causes weight gain and its associated health problems. A recent study may have supported my easy answer to this problem.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2009, vol 89 p 126) went like this:

• 11 men and women were kept in a lab for a month.

• For two weeks they could eat anything they wanted and were allowed to sleep for 8 ½ hrs a night.

• The other two weeks of the study was the same as before except that the people could now only sleep 5 ½ hours a night.

The Result: People ate an average of 220 more calories a day when they could only sleep 5 ½ hrs a night. Many of these calories were eaten after 7PM.

Bottom Line: For me, the take home message of this study is that people who sleep less, gain more weight simply because they are awake more and eating more calories. We can’t eat when we are sleeping (unless you sleepwalk!).

One of the basic rules of science goes like this: if you are faced with two answers to a problem, when in doubt, the simple answer is usually the correct answer. I could be completely wrong, but I have thought that eating more calories because we were awake longer was the answer all the time. It’s nice to have a little vindication.