For years researchers have found a link between sleep deprivation and obesity and a new study has found that sleeping less may make you eat more.Much of the previous research has looked at people with a high BMI (body mass index) but French researchers ha
For years researchers have found a link between sleep deprivation and obesity and a new study has found that sleeping less may make you eat more.
Much of the previous research has looked at people with a high BMI (body mass index) but French researchers have found that shortened sleep gives normal-weight men the munchies too.
In fact, cutting their sleep time from eight hours a night to four hours resulted in the participants wolfing down a Big Mac’s worth of extra calories during the day.
The researchers had 12 young men stick to their normal sleeping pattern for two days then went to bed at midnight and woke up at 8am one night before going to bed at 2am and waking up at 6am the next night
The study found that after sleeping for four hours the men ate 22% more calories compared to when they’d slept for eight hours.
On average they put away 560 more calories, with big increases at breakfast and dinner but not at lunch.
The researchers wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that “sleep restriction could be one of the environmental factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic.”
